Announced last night at the Sundance Film Festival…

ro*co productions, which is currently a partner of Oprah's OWN Documentary Club to identify and assist in the acquisition of feature documentaries, will be partnering with 1492 Pictures (producers of The Help and Harry Potter) to adapt documentary films into feature films. The first film set for adaptation through this partnership is the Yoav Potash award winning Crime After Crime, a documentary we've covered on the site several times last year after it was acquired by Oprah's OWN for a premiere on the network last fall. 

To recap, Crime After Crime chronicles the battle of two attorneys to free Debbi Peagler,  a woman who served 20 years of her life sentence for her involvement in the murder of a man who abused her. 

The partnership deal was negotiated by Sue Turley for ro*co films international and Michael Barnathan for 1492 Pictures.

Barnathan, president of 1492 pictures, said the following regarding the deal, “We are very excited about working with ro*co and Yoav to adapt CRIME AFTER CRIME into a dramatic feature film,” he says, “This extraordinary documentary has great potential as a narrative feature film. We have made films that began as ideas, books, plays, and screenplays.  While this will be our first documentary-to-dramatic-feature adaptation project, we certainly hope it is not our last.  ro*co has an uncanny ability to find and attract great documentary works and filmmakers.”

Founder and Managing director of ro*co Films International, Annie Rooney, stated, “At ro*co, we work with our filmmakers to maximize opportunities for their documentary films,” she says, “That’s why we have partnerships with broadcasters in the US and abroad, as well as an educational division to create a different kind of box office in classrooms and on college campuses across the country.  Finding the right partner to adapt these documentary narratives to the big screen was our next quest.  Working with 1492 Pictures, we know that these real life stories will become celebrated motion pictures.”

I'm not sure how I feel about this; my first reaction tells me it seems rather unnecessary, an overkill of the subject matter, especially if films are adapted from well-made documentaries like Crime After Crime.

Thoughts?