Kino Lorber Staff Picks: Nicholas Kemp Has Put a Lot of Love Into His Recs
Our latest Staff Picks come from a team member whose dedication to every Kino Lorber film is unparalleled. Nicholas Kemp, SVP of Theatrical Distribution and Marketing, shepherds each film through its entire life cycle and ensures their success at every step, even amid unthinkable obstacles. From the theatrical release, which Nick calls the “biggest thunderclap moment of awareness” that propels the film’s journey, to its digital and home entertainment windows, Nick oversees all aspects of marketing. Whether it’s trailer production, social media strategy, or grassroots outreach, every effort works toward the same goal. “At the end of the day,” he says, “my job is all about taking these great films, which are very different and very diverse, and finding audiences for them.” And that includes during a global pandemic.
After joining in 2017, Nick saw Kino Lorber through one of its most challenging periods, when COVID-19 shut the entire world down. What could have been a death knell for theatrical distribution became an opportunity for innovation and reinvention, and a testament to his unwavering commitment. So when Nick was asked to choose his top five films on Kino Film Collection, he naturally made his selection based on the love and effort that went into them.
Get to know Nick a bit more and stream his five recommendations on Kino Film Collection!
How and when did your love of film begin?
“Definitely in high school. That's definitely when I started to rent movies that were a little more on the arthouse side—international movies, indie films, and documentaries. That’s when I started to expand my taste, and that was definitely done at the video store, largely, because at the time that's where you could really find some of this stuff. I can remember having the DVDs for In the Mood for Love and Far From Heaven. When I was really young, I would rent Annie over and over. I was famous for that at the video store. So maybe that was the first movie that really got me addicted.
Then in college, I moved to New York and there were so many more options of places to watch movies—film festivals, arthouse theaters, and things like that. So my tastes expanded even more. It wasn't until a few years after college, when I was doing a bunch of freelance website and marketing work, that I ended up with a gig at what is now called Film at Lincoln Center, working on New York Film Festival and later their year-round programming. After six years there, I made the jump over to Kino Lorber to the distribution side, doing digital marketing and campaigns for theatrical releases, and I've been here ever since. So it was sort of a little bit of a backdoor or, you know, a sideways entry into the industry, but I'm so glad it happened. Now I can't imagine being anywhere else.”
Nick’s Top 5 Picks (in no particular order)
Slack Bay (2017)
“I guess I'll start with one of the first campaigns I worked on, in 2017. It's a movie called Slack Bay, which is directed by Bruno Dumont. Slack Bay is kind of like a slapstick French comedy about a group of wealthy people. I don't even remember why they're there, but they're at this estate in the French countryside, and they're just acting really crazy. It's got Fabrice Luchini, Juliette Binoche, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. They're all sort of luminaries of French cinema of a more recent era. I remember when we were cutting the trailer and making the poster, there was this quote that I kept insisting we use because it's so true, where one of the critics said it was sort of as if the entire cast had drunk their body weight in absinthe, because they're all very absurd, very over the top, very ridiculous. I don't even remember the plot. I honestly think it barely matters. It's just so fun to watch this cast of serious French actors have a ball and act ridiculous.
And a funny thing about Bruno Dumont—at least, the story I've heard—is that, you know, for years he made very serious films: The Life of Jesus, Humanité. He won awards at Cannes for very heavy films about the human condition and struggle, and all of these things. And then the word on the street is he fell in love, he met his now wife, and he just totally pivoted and now he makes exclusively absurdist comedies. I think Slack Bay might have been the first or maybe second of his absurdist comedy era that he has been in ever since.”
Tom of Finland (2017)
“OK, I’ve got to talk about one of my favorite campaigns that I ever worked on. So I mentioned that we do grassroots outreach for a lot of our releases, you know, organizations or schools or institutions who might have an interest in a given film that we're releasing. We see if we can get them to partner with us on the release or promote it in their newsletter and things like that. By far the most successful grassroots campaign we ever did was for Tom of Finland. Tom of Finland is a very famous gay artist whose pencil sketches of leathermen and muscle daddies are very, very iconic in the gay community and LGBTQ culture. He is originally Finnish and Finland has really embraced him as probably the most famous Finn ever, internationally. So they produced a very slick biopic about him that was really not at all scandalous. We picked it up and released it in the U.S. and it kind of tells his life story from when he served in World War II through to moving to California and becoming this famous artist.
We worked with the Tom of Finland Foundation on promoting it and it was so easy because in every single market, you just had to Google ‘Mr. Leather 2018 Cleveland’ or ‘leather organization Cleveland’ and find the local leather community. You send them one email telling them the film’s coming out and they did everything. It was incredible. They would organize big groups to attend the screenings. I think what it really taught me about grassroots outreach is it works best when you're plugging into folks who are already self-organized, and the leather community is very that. They were just so excited for this film that represented this icon from their community to be available and also represent this thing that they're so passionate about. We got all these incredible photos from the theaters of groups from the leather community who showed up in their leather outfits and their harnesses. We got really great crowds and people would organize introductions or Q&As or group trips and things like that. It was just the most delightful campaign to work on.”
Bacurau (2020)
“This is less about an individual film and more like a unique moment in time that I want to talk about. A very memorable moment from my time at Kino Lorber was, of course, the onset of COVID in March of 2020. It was obviously a huge disruption and a lot of theaters closed and there was a lot of dark news that came out of that period in terms of theatrical releasing and arthouse cinema. At Kino Lorber we were in the middle of releasing Bacurau, the Brazilian film with Sonia Braga and Udo Kier. It’s kind of a sci-fi Western. I think we opened it on March 13th, 2020, and so all the theaters shut down just a few days later. We were immediately like, ‘What can we do?’ We were feeling really scared for the theaters, so we very quickly, like within a week or something, set up a way for arthouse theaters to screen films in virtual cinemas. We called the program Kino Marquee. A lot of other distributors and platforms did something similar, but we were basically the first out of the gate with it. We made it so that theaters could still book our films and their patrons could rent the films at home and we would split the revenues with the theaters. Bacurau was the first film that we launched on it.
So yeah, we created this virtual cinema offering and it was a big success and a lot of theaters were able to make some money and keep connecting with their audience while they were closed. We ended up winning a New York Film Critics Circle special award for the work that we did to help the arthouse theaters in that tough time. It was also the first year we ever got a film onto Barack Obama's best-of-the-year movie list. We've had a few since, but we had three that year – Bacurau, Martin Eden, and Beanpole – and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so many congratulatory texts from friends in the industry as when that happened. That year, 2020, was very atypical but one where we really pivoted and did something interesting and were celebrated for it.”
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2019)
“Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is a really fantastic, gorgeous, eye-opening, jaw-dropping, thought-provoking documentary. The concept of the anthropocene is that we are in a new era that is defined by human impact on the planet and all the ways in which we are shaping the landscape, the natural world, and also the geological one. It’s directed by Nicholas de Pencier, Jennifer Baichwal, and Edward Burtynsky, who is also a photographer known for these very large format photos documenting human sites around the planet, so this documentary kind of builds on his approach.
The film takes you around the planet to places like Carrara, the giant marble quarry in Italy, where for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years, humans have been carving out giant plots of marble. It's huge so when you zoom out and see the total size of it and the patterns and everything that human beings have kind of etched into the landscape, it's really wild. The film also goes to northern Russia, where there's this smelting mining city that is truly something out of Dante's Inferno, like a really crazy hellish kind of landscape. There's a strange beauty to all these industrial sites, the way they present it, despite it being a negative impact on the planet.
There's also a fascinating section with these giant earthmovers, these truly ginormous machines that are used to really radically change the landscape for human use. Just watching this giant machine that looks like something out of a science fiction movie doing this work of flattening the land and totally changing the natural landscape of an area and the ways in which humans are able to have that large-scale impact—the film captures it in an incredibly gorgeous cinematic way. It's one of those movies that I just think a lot about ever since we released it, like whenever I'm passing by some big industrial site, I think of that film and the ways in which humans are leaving their mark on the planet.”
Custody (2018)
“OK, I’ve got to do this one. I think it’s maybe the most underrated film of ours that I worked on. I just think it's excellent and one of the most visceral and intense experiences I've had watching one of our films. Custody stars Lea Drucker, Denis Menochet, and Thomas Gioria. Essentially the story is like a triangulation—it’s an ex-husband, an ex-wife, and their son. There’s a custody battle going on. Part of the film is told through a mediation that's happening between the father and the mother. It turns into this very, very intense white-knuckle domestic thriller where at first you think that the father might be a reasonable character and as the film goes on, you realize more and more just how unsafe the situation really is for Lea Drucker’s character and for the child. It all builds towards a very intense, like truly a take-your-breath-away kind of culmination. I just think that the way in which the pacing and sound and the editing and everything is constructed, it really grabs hold of you and does not let you go. There are moments watching it where I was holding my breath without realizing it and it’s really just incredible.
It was a debut film from the director Xavier Legrand, adapted from an award-winning short. There wasn't a ton of awareness for it. I think it premiered at Venice and we released it here and it got very good reviews, but perhaps understandably, not everyone wanted to see a film about such an intense subject matter. But just in terms of incredible filmmaking, I think it's one of the best films I ever worked on that I always wished had gotten the recognition it deserves, so that's why I want to highlight it.”