Charles Darwin once noted that the species that survives “is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” As indie film buyers and sellers prepare to come together at the European Film Market in Berlin, there is a sense that, although the arthouse market is fragmented and not a little divided, the leaders in the field are adapting to the ever-evolving complexities of the specialty world.

There is a shift in the arthouse market away from straight drama. “Specialty has become a lot more genre-friendly. My term is we look for the ‘genre-teurs,’ for the auteurs of genre,” says Scott Shooman, head of IFC Entertainment Group. “While drama doesn’t perform the way it used to, we know the numbers and build our business model around the realities of the marketplace.”

The Match Factory has four films in competition at Berlin — “Queen at Sea,” “Home Stories,” “Rosebush Pruning” and “Rose” — that Thania Dimitrakopoulou, VP, international sales, says are jokingly referred to internally as all being family films. But in reality, “they could not be more different, one from the other,” although the one thing that unites them is that they are all about “identity and belonging,” she says.

The key is to know the audience for each film. “We’re trying to figure out each time who our target is,” says Gabrielle Stewart, CEO at HanWay Films. “There are definitely talent and stories that appeal to the streamers and that audience.” Then there is the question, “What makes a film theatrical?” Originality, the genre and which stars are attached are three considerations among many.

“There is the talent that appeals to the theatrical distributors, and it’s not always the same [as the streamers],” she says. “And there’s also a real discrepancy sometimes between what appeals to the U.S. market, as opposed to the international market.”

The division between the U.S. and international territories is also noted by Olivier Barbier, a former MK2 Films executive now heading Paris-based sales company Lucky Number, which is handling the Berlinale opener, “No Good Men,” an Afghan romantic comedy.

“Almost all of our films sell in the U.S., but the price gap is extreme. You have huge battles at Cannes with crazy prices for international rights, and alongside that you have prices that are extremely low for the U.S. We sometimes sell cheaper in the U.S. than in Bulgaria — and I’m hardly exaggerating,” he says.

Whatever the market landscape, the important question is: “How do we get people interested again in going to the cinema?” according to Mark Gooder, co-president of Cornerstone. “Our answer to that is: We have to go back to where we all started, which is with material that came out of nowhere, that people started to talk about and then what they went to see. So we think it is those films that are bold, original, innovative … the fresh take, the reinterpretation, whatever you want to call it, anything that’s not generic, right? I think ‘Pillion’ is a great example of what might have looked scary and a little bit ‘Ooh!’ has turned into something that people are embracing.”

Zach Glueck, co-CEO of recently launched Manifest Pictures, adds, “The worst thing you could be in this market is boring. I’d rather be out there with something that is aggressive and divisive than something …” and co-CEO Yvette Zhuang completes his thought, “that you’ve seen 10,000 times before.”

Another disjuncture in the market is between English- and non-English-language films, Tassilo Hallbauer, Beta Cinema’s executive VP of sales, acquisitions and international co-productions, says. The former, fueled by “private investors and gap and equity investments and so on, are having an incredibly difficult time at the moment to close financing,” he says. The latter, “where you have five, six countries co-producing and financing entirely out of soft money and [public] funds and so on” is faring better. It is London-based Hallbauer’s mission to bridge that divide with films like “500 Mile,” starring Bill Nighy and Maisie Williams, which has its market premiere at EFM.

Then there is the split in the audience based on age. “Anglo-Saxon distributors are much less afraid to seek out younger audiences for arthouse cinema,” says Barbier. “In Western Europe, as soon as a film targets younger audiences, there’s a reflex to say: We don’t know how to address them, so we don’t go there. Arthouse cinema needs to be revisited by younger audiences. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.”

Although in an ideal world the audience for a film will be drawn from all four quadrants, that’s not a common occurrence. The star of HanWay’s “Billion Dollar Spy,” Russell Crowe, appeals to a more mature crowd, while Christopher Briney, who appears in “The Julia Set,” is an example of an actor better known to the younger demographic, thanks to Amazon Prime series “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” Stewart says. HanWay is selling both in the EFM.

Anecdotally, it would appear that older audiences have returned to theaters at almost pre-COVID levels. “They’re back, and if anything, that’s the growing market again,” Janina Vilsmaier, senior VP of sales and distribution at Protagonist Pictures, says. “You can see that in all these territories. Some are faster, some are not, but it is going back to the levels that it was before.”

Barbier points to a schism between auteur films. “We started the company with a very basic idea, which was to counter a discourse that was becoming widespread and a little depressing, a discourse that was partly true, based on the polarization of sales between certain auteur films that would do very well and others that would not find their audience,” he says.

“If you look at the big festivals today, you have what we call first-week films – not only films that premiere in the first week, but films that are negotiated in the first week of the market,” he says. “Regardless of their size, distributors all go after the same films, even if it means losing them. The question is: How second-week films can exist?”

Movies are taking longer to sell, he says. “What I call the long term is actually selling films in several markets and not just at the time of the premiere. There is this belief that a film is marketed at the time of its arthouse premiere, and either it goes very well and wins everything, or it doesn’t and we move on to the next one. Our company’s philosophy was created to counteract this. We’ve had films that were successful over the long term,” Barbier says.

Shooman also says dealmaking is taking longer. “We end up talking about films for a long time. It doesn’t have to be that a movie is announced in a marketplace and it closes in 24 hours. This is a relationship business.”

But, notes Dylan Leiner, Sony Pictures Classics’ executive VP of acquisitions, production and business affairs, Berlin’s director, Tricia Tuttle, is playing her part in bridging indie divisions. “What Tricia is doing is moving Berlin in the right direction,” he says. “It’s a good mix of auteur and commercial, and she’s programming according to the zeitgeist of the culture.”