The Munich International Film Festival (MIFF) is to host a work-in-progress showcase for the first time this year, presenting projects by filmmakers from Brazil, Cameroon, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Spain and Germany from June 29.
The inaugural edition of First Cut+ Munich has been organised with the French-based film and talent development specialist Tatino. The six projects have been selected from Tatino’s First Cut Lab initiative and the Munich Film Up! international mentoring and residency programme.
Cameroonian filmmaker Cyrielle Raingou will be in Munich with her fiction debut I’m Coming For You, which was developed at the first edition of Munich Film Up! in 2021/2022. It centres on a young mother embarking on a journey of initiation to win back her baby who was taken away from her as punishment for trading with Boko Haram terrorists in the vast Sahelian region.
Raingou’s feature directorial debut, the documentary Le Spectre de Boko Haram, had its world premiere in Rotterdam in 2023, where it won the Tiger Award.
German filmmaker Erec Brehmer, another participant of the first edition of Munich Film Up!, will be presenting his second fiction film Lightness And Weight about two people bound by loss and searching for what was taken from them. It stars Austrian actor Thomas Schubert, who received a European Film Award nomination for Afire by Christian Petzold, alongside Swiss actress Melodie Simina.
The film is produced by the rising Bavarian production outfit Maverick Film. The company has also produced Alisa Kolosova’s I Spy With My Little which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.
Brehmer’s documentary Born To Fake, co-directed with Benjamin Rost, had its world premiere in Munich last year, where it won the One Future Award. It opened theatrically in Germany last week via distributor Across Nations.
From Brazil is Helen Beltrame-Linné’s hybrid documentary My Letter To B, described as a reflexive journey of a woman and an island through decades, influenced by the work of Ingmar Bergman.
Beltrame-Linné’s directorial debut is being produced by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Emilie Lesclaux through their company Cinemascopio. Beltrame-Linné has also worked as a screenwriter, script consultant and mentor in various development labs.
Meanwhile, Lost Years is inspired by the childhood memories of Slovenian director Áron Horváth-Botka. The road movie takes fragments of spending 1990s summers at his grandmother’s house in Vojvodina.The co-production between Slovenia’s Temporama and the nascent Serbian outfit Set Sail Films was shot on location in Serbia last summer.
Spanish director Mikel Gurrea’s second feature Sants is a co-production between Spain’s Nocturna Pictures and Italy’s Kino Produzioni. It sees the director reunited with the actress Vicky Luengo, who starred in his debut feature Suro, which won the Fipresci prize at San Sebastián 2022. Luengo, who starred in Almodovar’s Bitter Christmas and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, which both played in Cannes Competition last month, plays a young woman who joins an underground gang of thieves who steal statues from churches and cemeteries, as she faces the imminent death of her mother,
The sixth project in the First Cut+ Munich showcase is Bulgaria’s Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s Wild Horse In The Rotten World, their latest collaboration following Cat In The Wall and Women Do Cry.
The Bulgaria-UK-France co-production follows a mystery boy who appears at a London college, becomes mixed up in his friends’ new concepts and ends up as a whistleblower following attempts by a Russian oligarch to buy the institution.
The on-site activities of First Cut+ Munich will include a masterclass by marketing strategist Joanna Solecka of Alphapanda exploring how strategic digital campaigns can drive success for arthouse cinema, using case studies of Mr Nobody Against Putin and The Girl With The Needle.
The six projects will then be presented to accredited professionals at the festival followed by one-to-one meetings.
Munich-based production house Walker+Worm Film, whose credits include this year’s Berlinale titles Rose and Allegro Pastell, has sponsored the €2,000 Walker+Worm First Cut+ Award, which will go towards supporting one of the projects showcased in Munich. The successful project will be presented before the CineCoPro conference’s pitching event on July 1.
The Munich Film Festival runs June 26 - July 5.
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