Projects from Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Montenegro were among the award winners at the 23rd edition of the Sofia Meetings, the industry programme of Bulgaria’s Sofia International Film Festival (SIFF) that took place last week.
Two new awards were presented: Arte’s €5,000 Artekino international award went to the Bulgarian project Fathers by director Martin Iliev and producer Angel Ivanov; and Nia Marinova’s nascent Grey Pigeon Studios offered 10 production days to Roman Pessarov’s hybrid mockumentary Spy Passions about the life of his late father.
Postproduction services worth up to €15,000 from Cinelab Romania and €20,000 from Doli Media were awarded to North Macedonian filmmaker Vardan Tozija’s project, The Pot, The Lid And The Nurse, and to the Serbian-Montenegrin team of Giga Makes The Sea, respectively.
The Agora networking award for two accreditations to attend the co-production forum in Thessaloniki in November went to Turkish director Gözde Kural for her social satire, In Those Darkest Nights. Kural’s latest feature is her third following Dust and Cinema Jazireh, of which the latter screened in the festival’s international competition this year.
Producer feedback
Marta Krzeptowska of Warsaw-based AsterFilm praised the “perfect organisation” of the Sofia Meetings.
“It’s so easy for a producer to get lost in the big markets like Cannes or Berlin but here we had plenty of opportunities to speak with important people from production companies, festivals and sales companies in the formal meetings and the networking events in the evening,” said Krzeptowska, who was at the event to present writer-director Korek Bojanowski’s superhero project The Art Of Spitting.
“The feedback we had from three German producers at the one-to-one meetings was so positive and energetic, with one of them saying that he had asked to have a meeting with us just after reading the project’s title,” she continued. “It’s been valuable for us to be able to make closer connections with colleagues from Central and Eastern Europe because we have so many things in common.”
UK producer Dan Dixon of Snafu Pictures and writer-director Matt Harlock were also first-time attendees in Sofia with their project Reconstruction, which they had previously pitched at the Junior Entertainment Talent Slate (JETS) forum during this year’s Berlinale.
“We enjoyed the response in the room when we pitched our project because there was a very qualified audience and they were all switched on to understand what the story is about and engage with us as filmmakers,” Harlock said. “We picked up some very nice things from our side about the way people responded and how we can use that continuing forward in conversations.”
“We also had a consultation in advance about the project with [script and project consultant] Isabelle Fauvel,” Dixon added. “That 20-minute talk changed the direction of our pitch.”
Their focus is to attach a sales agent to Reconstruction. “Having a handful of sales agents attending the Meetings was fantastic,” said Dixon. “We had some great meetings to follow up.”
Italian producer-distributor Paolo Maria Spina of Rome-based Revolver said he valued Sofia’s focus on first, second and third feature film projects. “It’s nice to meet young talents at the beginning of their careers and if a relationship then becomes concrete, you can follow them for their future projects,” said Spina.
He has been a regular attendee of the Sofia Meetings for 20 years.
“The selection of the projects at such a coproduction event is like wine,” he suggested. ”You have some very good years and some that are less good, but I would say that this year was average with a couple of projects that I hope to follow during the rest of 2026.”
In addition to producing credits on films by Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Tarkovsky Jr. and Ivan Tverdovsky, Spina was the Italian production partner on the Bulgarian film Aurora by Nikola Boshnakov and Georgi Stoev, which screened in Sofia’s New Bulgarian Features sidebar at the festival this year.
Spina said he will be back in Bulgaria in June for a couple of shooting days for Krzysztof Zanussi’s Calopalenie, which is co-produced by SIFF festival director Stefan Kitanov’s production company RFF International.
Festival winners
Czech director Ondrej Provaznik’s Broken Voices was the big winner at the 30th edition of SIFF, taking home the Sofia City of Film Award in the International Competition for first and second films, as well as the Fipresci prize.
Premiering at Karlovy Vary last year and handled internationally by Salaud Morisset, Broken Voices was inspired by the real-life case in the Czech Republic from the early 1990s in which a choir master was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for the sexual abuse of teenagers.
The special jury award went to Bolivian filmmaker Álvaro Olmos’ coming-of-age story, The Condor Daughter, while the best director award was presented to Bulgaria’s Ralitza Petrova for her second feature Lust, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale Forum last month.
The best Balkan film award was presented to North Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s Mother, while Hana Jusić’s God Will Not Help received a special mention.
Viktor Kossakovsky’s Trillion won the best documentary award.
SIFF’s 30th edition presented a total of 167 films from 60 countries, and a selection from the programme will now be available online within Bulgaria at neterra.tv+ IPTV online platform until April 15.
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