Janja Kralj

Source: KinoElektron

Janja Kralj

Need to know: Paris-based producer Janja Kralj launched KinoElektron in 2010 with the aim of producing independent arthouse films across all genres. To date it has produced and co-produced 13 features, all of which have debuted in A-list festivals. The company kicked off its activities with Romanian-French director Eva Pervolovici’s first feature Marussia, which debuted in Berlin’s Generation section in 2013. Further titles include French director Elise Girard’s comedy-drama Strange Birds, which played in Berlin’s Forum in 2017; US director Ben Russell’s Locarno 2017 competition title Good Luck; South African filmmaker Teboho Edkins’ documentary Days Of Cannibalism, which played in Berlin’s Panorama in 2020; and Cannes 2020 label selection In The Dusk by Lithuania’s Sharunas Bartas, with whom Kralj has worked on three features. The producer describes her work as a vocation and approaches each project as a “prototype production”. On the financing front, she is a regular on the co-production market circuit and is adept at piecing together multiple sources of finance.

Key personnel: Janja Kralj, CEO and producer; Barbara Crvelin, head of productions.

Incoming: Ali Cherri’s Sudan-set The Dam debuts in Directors’ Fortnight. It is in post on Portuguese director Susana Nobre’s Cidade Rabat, a co-production with regular Lisbon-based partner Terra­treme. It is also gearing up for the September shoot of French-Serbian director Vladimir Perisic’s Shame, co-written by Alice Winocour, about the anti-Milosevic student protests in Belgrade in the late 1990s, and Sharunas Bartas’s Wanderers.

Janja Kralj says: “KinoElektron has a double task. We are a tool that adapts to the filmmakers and invents spaces of freedom within which they can carry out their visions. And we propose to audiences films that respect their power of imagination.” 

Contact: info@kinoelektron.com