New projects by Ildikó Enyedi, Rubika Shah and Vero Cratzborn have been backed by the CNC and FFA’s Franco-German co-production fund at its first session of 2023.
A total of €450,000 production support was awarded to Enyedi’s next feature Silent Friend which has been structured as a co-production between lead producer Cologne-based Pandora Film with France’s Galatée Films, Hungary’s Inforg M&M Film and China’s Rediance Films.
The film focuses on an ancient tree in the Botanical Gardens of the university town of Marburg to explore the relationship between man and nature.
The FFA and CNC each allocated €90,000 production support to UK filmmaker Rubika Shah’s documentary project Mad Dog Of Europe which has Paris-based Le Bureau Films as majority producer with Cologne’s Heimatfilm as the German partner.
The film’s title refers to the screenplay written by Citizen Kane co-writer Herman Mankiewicz in 1933 warning Americans about the dangers of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. However, no studio was willing to back the project as they were fearful that Nazis might ban all American films from the German market in retaliation.
Shah will be collaborating on this project with Ed Gibbs, the screenwriter and producer of her previous award-winning 2019 documentary White Riot.
In addition, €30,000 project development support was given to Belgian filmmaker Vero Cratzborn’s thriller Molécules which was pitched by the French majority producer Tomsa Films at the Alliance for Development platform during last August’s Locarno Film Festival.
Cratzborn’s screenplay with Aurélien Peilloux centres on the decision by a woman to take part in the first clinical trials of an experimental molecule to save her twin sister from a degenerative disease.
Berlin-based Schuldenberg Films, who was in Locarno last year with the world premiere of Ann Oren’s Piaffein the main competition, is onboard as the German co-producer.
This is the second time in a row that the German-French Funding Commission had decided to support projects exclusively by women filmmakers.
At last summer’s session, the commission had backed four projects with French and German production partners by filmmakers Valeska Grisebach, Suzannah Mirghani, Mareike Engelhardt and Catherine Maximoff.
The FFA reported in its funding overview for 2022 that nine of the 17 projects supported by this Franco-German fund with a total of €3.15m will be made by women filmmakers.
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