Belgrade-based company will present its initial slate at Cannes.

The first independent Eastern European world sales company Soul Food Distribution will present its initial slate at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival.

The company was founded this spring in Belgrade by Igor Stankovic, CEO of Megacom Film, Serbia’s largest distributor of independent and European films, and producer Miroslav Mogorovic, president of Art & Popcorn, the company behind Stefan Arsenijevic’s Love And Other Crimes and Thomas Woschitz’s Universalove.

“The market potential of films from Eastern Europe is underestimated from commercial point of view. The problem is probably in the lack of sales agents from this part of the world. When national film centres present their countries’ cinema, they present it as a whole and buyers are interested in finding one gem from each, and not in a national cinema as a whole,” Stankovic tells Screen. “Our primary intention is to sell Eastern European films within Eastern Europe. It’s logical because of similarities of languages and cultures in the region, and large communities living in each other’s countries. It’s only natural that a Serbian film should play in Bulgaria and vice-versa.”

For its initial slate, Soul Food has selected films from the territories of former Yugoslavia. It includes well-known festival titles such as Goran Markovic’s Tour (winner of best director and FIPRESCI awards at Montreal World Film Festival), Vladimir Paskaljevic’s Devil’s Town (awarded at Palm Springs and Trieste), Zvonimir Juric’s and Goran Devic’s The Blacks (prizes at Pula, Cottbus, Ljubljana, Belgrade and Linz), Dalibor Matanic’s Kino Lika and Mladen Djordjevic’s Life And Death Of A Porn Gang.

For pre-sales, Soul Food has acquired rights to Practical Guide To Belgrade With Singing And Crying, the directing debut (due for release in early 2011) of Serbia’s Bojan Vuletic, co-writer of Love And Other Crimes; and So Hot Was The Cannon by Slobodan Skerlic, based on the bestseller by Vladimir Kecmanovic (mid 2011).

The buzz title on the slate seems to be Some Other Stories, an omnibus made up of five stories about motherhood by young women directors from countries of former Yugoslavia. The co-production between Serbia’s SEE Film Pro, Slovenia’s Studio Maj, Croatia’s 4Film, Bosnia’s Dokument, Macedonia’s Skopje Film Studia and Ireland’s Octagon Film and DIG Productions, directed by Ana Maria Rossi, Hanna Slak, Ivona Juka, Ines Tanovic and Marija Dzidzeva will have its world premiere at Taormina.

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