The Berlinale Talent Campus has received 75% more applications for next year's event with 3,500 entries coming from 101 countries, compared to 2,000 from 70 countries for the first edition last February.

Talent Campus project manager Christine Dorn told ScreenDaily.com that applications had come from countries like Mali, Azerbaijan, Syria, Senegal and Afghanistan which have hardly any film industry to speak, if at all. "It is thanks to our network, the German Foreign Office, the embassies and the Goethe Institut that we have such a wide geographical spread", Dorn said, pointing out that Germany and the UK were level pegging with the greatest number of applications followed by the USA, Canada, France, Spain, Italy and Colombia.

The Working Campus projects that allow young talents to work in small teams during the Campus week have also proven to be very popular: by the November 7 deadline, 184 talents had applied to participate in the Talent Project Market being organised as part of the newly created Berlinale Co-production Market (ScreenDaily.com, October 21 2003), 151 to participate in the making of one of the five digital "Talent Movies of the Week", and 115 alumni from this year's Campus to work on a "Making of" diary of the 2004 edition. In addition, 40 budding film critics and journalists have applied for one of the ten places on the Talent Press initiative (deadline: Nov 14).

The list naming the 500 talents chosen to participate in the Campus from February 7-12 will be published by the end of January 2004.

Dorn added that there had been enquiries from festivals in Argentina, Brazil, India and Israel to stage their own Talent Campus along the lines of the Berlinale model. The first foray of the Talent Campus franchise was made by Kiev's Molodist festival at the beginning of this month when young Ukrainian filmmakers attended discussions led by Dorn, pitching expert Sibylle Kurz, Berlinale festival delegate Nikolaj Nikitin, and Russian film critic Andrei Plakhov and also shot five digital films which will be shown in Berlin in February.