Streaming drives subtitling, dubbing boom, 35mm film processing grows, Hiventy Chief reports

Hiventy, one of France’s leading post-production companies, is seeing rising demand across its range of services, including film processing, dubbing and subtitling, post-production, film restoration and BluRay mastering. It has operations in France, Poland, Singapore, Vietnam, Kenya and Nigeria.

Hiventy has one of the few film lab services in Europe. CEO Thierry Schindele says that there has been rising demand for the company’s film processing services. Recent 35mm shoots processed by the group include Pablo Larrain’s “Spencer,” Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” and Christophe Honoré’s “Le Lycéen,” produced by Les Films Pelléas. Recent French films handled by Hiventy include Mia Hansen Love’s “One Beautiful Morning,” Serge Bozon’s “Don Juan,” Léa Mysius’ “The Five Devils” and Pietro Marcello’s “The Flight.”

Schindele expects demand for film processing services to continue to rise. Hiventy is supplying film processing services for shoots across Europe. For example, “Asteroid City” was shot in Spain, and “Spencer” was shot on location in England and Germany.

Film processing is only a small part of Hiventy’s overall business. Fifty per cent of the group’s revenue derives from subtitling and dubbing services for film and TV, with increasing demand from streaming platforms.

Schindele considers that Hiventy ranks amongst the top five suppliers of subtitling and dubbing services in Europe and expects continued growth for this market. Main clients include TF1, Arte, M6 and Netflix.

The provision of worldwide subtitling and dubbing services has been a key driver of its growth, for example it acquired Polish dubbing studio Mediadub in the late 2000s to accompany Canal Pus’ expansion into Poland and founded CMC in Vietnam in 2009, to accompany TV5 Monde’s expansion into Far-East Asia.

It was when it began providing services to Netflix, from around 2014 onwards, that the group had to restructure its entire operations. “Netflix produces programming for worldwide release,” says Schindele. “This requires a massive increase in our subtitling and dubbing services and provision of the overall technical package. Before we only dubbed films and series when they were sold to a country.”

The group provides post-production services for film and TV. Recent work includes French animated feature “The Summit of the Gods,” based on the Japanese manga series, and Irish animation feature “Wolfwalkers.”

Post-production on TV series include several projects for Netflix: “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan,” “Trial 4,” “What’s Up” and “Notre-Dame, the Fire Part.”

Film restoration is another key area for Hiventy, for theatrical release, television distribution and BluRay. Recent titles restored by the group include the entire catalog of Marcel Pagnol (such as “Marius,” “Fanny,” “César,” “La femme du boulanger”), titles from the Pathé catalog (including Patrice Leconte’s “Tango and Tandem”), work for Studiocanal (including Joseph Losey’s “Mr. Klein”) and films by Jacques Rivette and Krzysztof Kieślowski.

The group is also seeing rising demand for BluRay titles, and in 2021 worked on 176 titles, of which 112 were mastered in standard BluRay and 12 in Ultra-HD Blu-Ray.

Schindele is upbeat for the future: “We’ve been enjoying progressive rising demand for our services. There was significant downward pressure on prices between 2012 and 2019 and the pandemic has also caused significant disruptions. But now we’re seeing rising profitability and forecast solid growth.” Variety