New feature projects by Cedric Kahn, Jan Svankmajer andPatrice Chereau are among 12 European co-productions which have been awarded atotal Euros 4.64m by the pan-European co-production fund Eurimages.

The largest single amount - Euro 600,000 - was given to byCedric Kahn's L'Avion, which explores a child's universe and starsIsabelle Carre, Vincent Lindon and Lambert Wilson. The film is set up as aEuros 10m Franco-German co-production between Fidelite and Berlin-based AkkordFilm Produktion.

The next largest amounts of funding are Euros 580,000 eachfor Christian Carion's Joyeux Noel, which will star Good Bye,Lenin!'s Daniel Bruehl and will be produced by France's Nord QuestProduction with Germany's Senator Film Produktion, Romania's Media Pro Pictures,Belgium's Artemis Productions and the UK's Joyeuxnoel Ltd and for PatriceChereau's Joseph Conrad adaptation Trois Soirees, starring IsabelleHuppert and Pascal Greggory.

Euros 230,000 Euro was allocated to Czech filmmaker JanSvankmajer's new film Sileni, which is based on a script by Svankmajerand draws on short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, to beco-produced by the Czech Republic's Athanor-Spolecnost Pro Filmnovou Tvorbuwith Slovakia's Juraj Galvanek C-GA Film and Russia's Nikola-Film Cinemastudio.

Euros 550,000 was also granted to the animation feature TheUgly Duckling & Me!, which is being co-directed by Denmark's MichaelHegner and Karstan Killerich for the Danish animation studio A Film with MagmaFilms' new German outpost Ulysses GmbH Film- u. Fernsehproduktion, France'sFuturikon and Galway-based Magma European Scripting.

Spanish auteur Montxo Armendariz also received Euros 400,000for his Basque drama Obaba, which begins principal photography inSeptember as a majority Spanish-German co-production between Oria Films andKarl "Baumi" Baumgartner's Pandora Filmproduktion und Vertriebs GmbH.

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