The Munich International Film Festival (MIFF) is becoming increasingly popular with international professionals who head to the German festival to see the emerging German talents in the New German Cinema programme.
Execs from top companies, including LevelK, Trust Nordisk, Vuelta Film Group, Cercamon, Pluto Film and Salaud Morisset, are in town this year.
The festival’s Industry Days programme takes place from June 28 to July 3. It features a packed lineup of masterclasses, networking events and panels, overseen by Alina Götzlich, the festival’s new head of industry.
There will be two discussions about Germany’s proposed streamer investment obligation, which would require platforms and other audiovisual services to invest a percentage of their annual turnover generated in Germany into the local film industry.
The panels will bring together speakers from the culture ministry as well as from Amazon and Netflix, including Wolf Osthaus, the latter’s senior director, global affairs, for Northern Europe.
Further masterclasses will include ‘Creative Alliances: The Power of International Producers’ Networks’, hosted by the Kirch Foundation, which will feature German producer Roman Paul of Razor Film and Norway’s Synnove Horsdal of Maipo Film, both part of The Creatives producer network, who will explore best practice in building fruitful and meaningful international collaborations.
The future of the media industry as artificial intelligence’s influence grows will be in the spotlight as various panels address the practical, legal and political ramifications of using AI in dubbing studios, as well as the impact of AI on film criticism around the world as seen from the perspective of the festival’s Fipresci jury.
Pitching events
First Cut+ Munich, in collaboration with the French production and consultancy company TATINO, will present six international works-in-progress drawn from First Cut Lab and the Munich Film Up! mentoring and residency programme, on June 30.
The projects screening will include Cameroonian filmmaker Cyrielle Raingou’s fiction debut I’m Coming For You and Brazilian director Helen Beltrame-Linné’s hybrid documentary My Letter To B.
The flagship of the Industry Days’ international activities is the CineCoPro Conference (June 30-July 2), which this year features a regional focus on the five Nordic countries. Some 25 emerging producers from the Five Nordics, including Finland’s Jenni Jauri (Silmu Films), Denmark’s Mia Myrälf (SF Studios) and Iceland’s Ingimar Guðbjartsson (Atlavík), will attend Munich for one-to-one meetings, pitching sessions, networking opportunities and the now traditional raft trip along the River Isar, with potential German partners including Tanja Georgieva-Waldhauer (Elemag Pictures), Ruth Ersfeld (Almabäng) and Fabian Altenried ( Schuldenberg Film).
“The Nordic countries have become one of Europe’s strongest co-production networks, making them an ideal partner for the CineCoPro Conference,” Götzlich explains. “There has been a growing conversation about German-Nordic collaboration over the past couple of years. [Hamburg regional fund] MOIN launched its Nordic NEST development programme last year and Germany was the country in focus at Göteborg’s Nordic Film Market in January.”
Opportunities for German and Nordic producers to come together on a project will be on offer at the CineCoPro Conference’s pitching session of five projects from Germany and another four from the Nordic countries. They will include presentations of Metrocosmos, a documentary series about subway systems around the world, by Seehund Media’s Sebastian Rieker, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson’s social drama Let There Be Light by Rakel Gardarsdottir of Iceland’s Vesturport, and the live-action/animation family film Bolliver by Norwegian producer Eleonore Anselme of The Global Ensemble Drama.
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