Shooting wrapped on Zentropa Poland’s first Polish-language project

Principal photography has wrapped on Kasia Roslaniec’s Baby Blues which is Zentropa International Poland’s first local Polish-language project.

Zentropa International Poland was established in September 2008 by filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska and Peter Aalbaek Jensen with the main objective of opening the Polish film industry to international co-productions and enabling the efficient collaboration of Polish and European filmmakers.

“At the same time, we aim at producing ambitious Polish movies, especially by young directors, giving them an opportunity to enter the European market with the help of Zentropa” the company says in its mission statement.

Zentropa’s Polish outpost was a partner on Lars von Trier’s Antichrist and Per Fly’s The Woman That Dreamed About a Man before boarding Szumowska’s French-language film Sponsoring, starring Juliette Binoche.

Roslaniec’s drama about teenage pregnancy is the Andrzej Wajda School of Film Directing graduate’s second feature after her debut Mall Girls and received PLN 3.5m from the Polish Film Institute (PiSF).

The PLN [Polish Zlotys] 6.2m project had been pitched last year at the Sofia Meetings in March and Rome’s New Cinema Network in October.

Roslaniec cast the female lead by collaborating with the music channels MTV and Viva Polska to launch a nationwide search for find new faces and selected 17-year-old Magdalena Berus from some 6,000 candidates.

Baby Blues will be distributed in Poland next year by Kino Swiat.

Roslaniec’s debut Mall Girls had been number one at the Polish box-office for three weeks on its theatrical release in 2009 and attracted a total 580,000 admissions, reaching fifth position at Poland’s box-office for that year.

In addition, the young director was one of the participants at this week’s New Horizons Studio training programme held in Wroclaw from July 23-26 for 22 young filmmakers from across Europe.

The participants included Igor Chojna, whose short fiction The Stain is screening in the New Polish Shorts Competition in Wroclaw, as well as writer-director Pawel Ferduk who learnt this week that his feature debut as a screenwriter, Ki directed by Leszek David, has been selected for this year’s Venice Days.

Unlike the first edition of New Horizons Studio, which had only been open to Polish participants, this year saw filmmakers coming from other parts of Europe such as Norway, Romania, France and Portugal.

The IndieLisboa, Transilvania and Cinnesone festivals and the Norwegian Film Institute had helped bring non-Polish participants to the 2011 edition. They included Portuguese producer Joao Figueiras whose documentary production Red Dawn by Joao Pedro Rodrigues and Joao Rui Guerra da Mata has been selected for the Leopards of Tomorrow Corti d’autore special programme at next month’s Locarno Film Festival, and Romanian director George Dorobantu who is close to completing production of his third independent feature Omega Rose, a low-budget post-apocalyptic road movie. Dorobantu’s second digital feature Bucharestless had screened at the Transilvania International Film Festival last month.

Speakers this year included consultant Hayet Benkara, London Film Academy’s Ri Chakraborty, UK producer Ivana McKinnon, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski, sales agent Anais Clanet of Wide House, Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Juliette Jansen, and Beata Monka, Chairman and CEO of Canal + Cyfrowy.