Wasted Youth team plans EFM screening

Konstantinos Kontovrakis, executive producer of Rotterdam opening film Wasted Youth, has confirmed to Screen that the filmmaking team has set up a market screening at Berlin’s European Film Market.

The screening is planned for Sat, Feb 12 at 19:00 at the Parliament.

Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel wrote and directed the story set in contemporary Athens.

Kontovrakis [pictured] and producers George Karnavas (Steffi Productions) and Papadimitropoulos (Oxymoron Films) are also meeting with sales companies here in Rotterdam, where the film is competing for a Tiger Award. “What we want is to find a good sales agent who really believes in the film,” he told Screen.

But Kontovrakis noted that they were prepared to move ahead without a sales agent on board at the EFM if necessary.

Meanwhile, Nutopia will release in Greece on March 17.

The project is unusual in its speed to screen — taking less than three months from inception to wrap of principal photography. The duo of Papadimitropoulos and Vogel conceived the idea and came up with a rough outline of the story (no script was written). The Euros 200,000 budget was raised by Karnavas in one week.

“It was a film that needed to be made really urgently,” Kontovrakis says. “It had to be made nwo or not at all.”

Rotterdam has been a good fit to launch Wasted Youth, he notes (it is also available on Festival Scope). “All of us felt it was the best platform for the film. Here everyone is willing to see smaller films from unknown names and yet you also have all the professionals here. It works much better for a smaller film than Berlin or Cannes where you can get lost in all the big names or glamour.”

The next festivals for the film will be determined in coming weeks.

Kontovrakis will head to EAVE in Luxembourg in March with his next project, Polyxeni. That melodrama, being written by Dora Masklavanou of Greece and Baris Pirhasan of Turkey, will be co-produced by Ceyda Tufan of Pi Film Production (Turkey) and Fenia Cossovitsa of Blonde Audiovisual Production (Greece).

That film, based on a true story, will tell the tragic life story of a Greek woman raised as an adopted child in Istanbul, where she was victimised in the community. That Euros 800,000 project is likely to shoot in 2012, shooting entirely in Istanbul.