Kiwi chess drama on track for profitable endgame

The Dark Horse producer Tom Hern says a North American distributor for the film starring Cliff Curtis will be signed off in weeks.

Producer Tom Hern remembers the nightmarish preparation for the launch of indie hit film The Dark Horse at the Toronto International Film Festival, which has ultimately been a key part of its success in courting the international film market.

"Our France-based sales agent had to step off the project for personal reasons and we had just two weeks to find a replacement," Hern said.

It's a short time for the often complex issues of film sales, he says. It is the sales agent's job to sell to territorial distributors in different counties who pay for rights.

Luckily, there was positive advance word on The Dark Horse - a true story about Genesis Potini, a charismatic, brilliant but little-known New Zealand chess champion.

There was a bidding war between agents which extracted a hefty advance fee on sales and has enabled production company Four Knights to pay out its private investors.

A month on from Toronto and Hern is confident The Dark Horse, which is understood to have had a budget of about $4 million, is headed for a profit.

Rights have been sold to distributors for Germany, the UK, the Benelux countries, Columbia, Turkey, Israel, the Middle East and Switzerland with more to come.

And Hern believes securing a North American distributor - a prerequisite for a strong commercial performance - will be signed off in the next two weeks.

The Dark Horse has received extraordinarily positive word of mouth support in New Zealand and good reviews, both here and at the Toronto Festival. The Canadian festival is becoming increasingly important as a venue where US film rights buyers can see how films appeal to a North American audience.

The New Zealand box office is nearing $1.8 million and that is also important - domestic box office is generally a touchstone for overseas buyers.

Hern believes Four Knights has shown investors it has moved from being a ground floor film company to a success story with a solid future. He and director James Napier Robinson - who own Four Knights with entrepreneur Tom Woods and his wife Sasha - are working on the next project.

The Dark Horse had made him a workaholic for the past few years, he said. "It's head down and bum up. The great thing now is there is already international prospects for [director] James Napier Robinson who has been approached by a couple of international productions to work on projects with a bigger budget," Hern said. "That was the plan with The Dark Horse - to put a flag in the ground with our company's name on it and create a bridge to the bigger-budget projects."

Hern is not going to stick to the same genre but insists Four Knights has to stand by its brand.

"That is where a lot of film companies come off the rails - they lose sight of what the company stands for creatively," he said. "Human dramas set our world on fire. That is what we are passionate about and we want stories that leave a lasting impact on audiences, that they talk about weeks or even months afterwards - not disposable commercial content."

Four Knights has three or four other projects waiting in the wings. None have been announced but Hern admits one of them is very different - a sports comedy about sheep shearing.

It is called Shearing the Love and Hern says it generated a lot of market interest when discussed with investors in Toronto. That, he says, was an offshoot of the success for The Dark Horse. It meant they now get access to industry players who would otherwise have been off limits.