New Charlie Hebdo Doc Goes Global

LONDON: Passion Distribution has secured international presales for Charlie Hebdo: 3 Days of Terror, a documentary focused on the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and the manhunt that followed.

Charlie Hebdo: 3 Days of Terror comes from BAFTA-winning director Dan Reed. It is produced by Reed's AMOS Pictures in association with the BBC, HBO and France 2. The hour-long special has been licensed to Discovery in Italy, Channel 8 in Israel, VTM in Belgium and HBO in Hungary and the Netherlands.

Reed remarked: "I'm so thrilled with this film—I wanted to make something that was as gripping as a Bourne film, but based on rock-solid journalism. I wanted to get my audience closer than ever to the action, but also for them to experience the story in a very immersive, intimate way—and we were able to do this through the eyes of some incredible survivors we interviewed.

The storytelling combines controversial, unseen footage with stunning cinematography, musical composition and editing to create an intensely cinematic experience that is also 100 percent real, 100 percent true. For me that is the way forward in documentary—groundbreaking journalism expressed in a very cinematic language. It is supremely difficult to achieve and my production team and I have pushed ourselves right to the limit in making this film.

At the heart of its big, heart-stopping scenes—the attack on Charlie, the assault on the Jewish deli—are exclusive and unseen images and interviews, and these were the elements we looked at first when we pulled the rough-cut together in the edit. But as we worked on the scenes we realized that they also delivered a great deal of emotion and moments of humor and drama that surpass anything a fiction writer could invent.

When piecing together the story we were able to draw on secret sources and extensive interviews with officials and survivors, which allowed us over many months of cross-checking and corroboration to put together the whole timeline of the attacks, blow by blow—something no one had actually managed to do before. This is without doubt the most ambitious documentary ever made about a terrorist attack in Europe."