After Shari Redstone sold Paramount Global to David Ellison’s Skydance in 2024, she chose something unexpected for her next act: Sipur, a growing film and TV studio based out of Israel. When Redstone joined as chair last year, it supercharged the company, says co-founder Emilio Schenker, who met Redstone two years ago when Paramount picked up the rights to Sipur’s Oct. 7 documentary “We Will Dance Again.” Today he considers her a “dear friend” as well as business partner. Now Sipur, whose USP is high-end international co-pros on modest budgets, has opened a London office, a natural step for a company Schenker co-founded with investor Gideon Tadmor seven years ago.
The plan is to continue making smart investments into a range of international co-pros like Casper Kelly’s feature “Buddy,” popular fare such as “Mirame Asi, El Camino de Noa” starring Noa Kirel, high-end dramas such as “Heart of a Killer” (featuring “Tehran’s” Niv Sultan) and the upcoming Yariv Mozer doc “Blood Brothers,” about rival Iranian and Israeli Olympic judo players who form an unlikely friendship, which is being produced with Fox Entertainment Studio and Fulwell. Ahead of Mipcom, Schenker and Attal sat down with Variety to talk about their plans for the company, what they’re looking for at Mipcom and give a glimpse into some of their upcoming projects – including Olivier Dahan’s upcoming project “Nana.” (Marvelous Productions are co-producing with ARP Sélection, who will also handle French distribution.) Emilio: My husband has lived here in London for a long time, so London always felt like a natural home for me. But from day one, we wanted to build a global entertainment studio, and I think that [for the first] seven years our headquarters’ focus was in Israel.
This is a new beginning for Sipur … with a brand-new office in London, with new partners that we’re announcing soon. The ambition is to become a global studio, and it’s also very important that Ludovic decided to join Sipur after a very, very long time that I’ve been chasing after him and trying to convince him to leave the very, very comfortable and amazing job he had at Amazon MGM Studios and to come to work for this crazy startup for content. So I’m so happy that he finally said yes.
Ludo: I met with Emilio in 2019 when Sipur signed the first-look deal with MGM. So I was on the other side. I met with Emilio, and we had a great professional collaboration.
And I was seeing Sipur becoming something with a significant place in the market that has been able to pivot along the years for different reasons, based on the geopolitical situation and how they have been able to also invest in American films and international series. So I saw them first succeeding in everything they were doing and pivoting based on how the market was changing, and in a market that changes every single day in terms of technology, in terms of trends, in terms of everything, I think that being nimble today is one of the best qualities that a company can have. And obviously having great partners in the company, like Shari Redstone, and also [Sipur co-founder] Gideon Tadmore, has been a very important point for me to make this decision, with the addition of the talent of Emilio and the team.
Emilio: Bringing Shari Redstone on board was a game changer… the fact that this iconic figure who built, ran one of the biggest empires in the history of the entertainment industry, deciding one day after she sold the company to invest in a very tiny – in comparison to Paramount, we are tiny — company that was based in Israel. This was a huge game changer for the company. Having her — with all the relationships and all the knowledge and experience and connections — it’s something that would take us a hundred years to get to this place.
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