Filmmakers from the UK, Germany, Turkey and Canada are among 13 teams selected to pitch feature projects in development at the 2026 Sofia Meetings to be held from March 18-22 during the 30th edition of the Sofia International Film Festival (SIFF) in Bulgaria.
The line-up includes UK writer-director Matt Harlock’s feature Reconstruction, which will follow his thriller Blockhead, which premiered at last year’s UK Frightfest.
Produced by Dan Dixon’s London-based Snafu Pictures,
Reconstruction centres on a true-crime producer desperate to save her failing show, who is contacted by a killer, promising victims in return for exposure
Germany is represented by two projects: Florian Hoffmeister’s Her Story, which will be the third feature from the internationally acclaimed DoP whose credits include Tar and The Riders, and Heavy Light, the debut feature of Academy of Media Arts student Stefan Koutzev.
Heavy Light is the story of a stray dog who travels from the streets of Bulgaria to a new life in Germany, mirroring the experience of human migration.
From Bulgaria, writer-director Martin Iliev and producer Angel Ivanov of Sofia-based handplayed, will pitch Martin Iliev’s debut feature Fathers, while Turkish director Gözde Kural is attending with In Those Darkest Nights about a woman’s absurdly hilarious struggle for light, space and sanity when an enormous flag invades her apartment.
Kural’s previous film Cinema Jazireh, screened at the Karlovy Vary film festival last year.
Lebanese Canadian filmmaker Katia Jarjoura will be in Sofia to pitch the heist thriller Robbing Beirut, inspired by a series of bank robberies that followed Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019. The film is about a young woman, desperate to find a way to pay for her sister’s leukaemia treatment.
The film will be Jarjoura’s debut fiction feature and is being produced by Michel Zana for Blue Train Films with partners from Norway and Lebanon. It won the Red Sea Souk Production Award at the 2024 Red Sea International Film Festival and was also pitched at the Crossroads Pitching Forum in Thessaloniki last November.
Works in progress
The Sofia Meetings will also showcase 10 works in progress, including Slovak director Michal Blaško’s Cowgirl, his second feature after his award-winning debut Victim. The coming-of-age drama Cowgirl is about a 14-year-old girl who escapes into a world of horses when her life unravels following the discovery her father is involved in a corruption scandal.
Also featured is Theo Papadoulakis’ debut feature Recrucified, produced by Greece’s Indigo View Productions with partners from Italy, Cyprus, and Luxembourg. Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ best-selling novel Christ Recrucified, the film is set in the near future on a Greek island living under foreign occupation, where a rebellious street artist is coerced into portraying Jesus in the Easter Passion Play.
In addition, the Bulgarian co-directing team of Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova will present their latest collaboration, Wild Horse On The Rotten West, a France-Bulgaria co-production about a mysterious boy who appears at a London college. It follows their previous work, Cat In The Wall and Women Do Cry.
UK journalist Keme Nzerem’s The Long Juju will be one of two documentaries screening as a work in progress in Sofia. The UK- Nigeria-US collaboration is a vérité-style documentary following Nzerem as he embarks on a genealogical search across Nigeria, South Carolina, and London,
Sofia Meetings 2026
Feature projects in development
Carolina’s Dream (Italy)
Dir: Stella Leonetti
Fathers (Bulgaria)
Dir: Martin Iliev
Her Story (Germany-Macedonia)
Dir: Florian Hoffmeister
In Those Darkest Nights (Turkey-Bulgaria)
Dir: Gözde Kural
Placeholder (Serbia-Germany-Bulgaria-Austria-Croatia)
Dir: Višnja Sretenović
Reconstruction (UK)
Dir: Matt Harlock
Robbing Beirut (France-Lebanon-Norway)
Dir: Katia Jarjoura
Heavy Light (Germany)
Dir: Stefan Koutzev
Spy Passions (Bulgaria)
Dir: Roman Pessarov
The Art Of Spitting (Poland)
Dir: Korek Bojanowski
The Kordy’s Case (Czech Republic)
Dir: Ondřej Zima
The Last Game (Romania)
Dir: Andrei Redinciuc
The Pot, The Lid And The Nurse (North Macedonia)
Dir: Vardan Tozija
No comments yet