Made In EU, the new film by award-winning Bulgarian filmmaker Stephan Komanderev, has received €220,000 from the Leipzig-based regional German fund MDM in its latest round of awards.
Produced by Halle-based 42Film, which also produced Karlovy Vary winner Blaga’s Lessons, the film is based on real events that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bulgaria. A seamstress working in a clothing factory in a small town is at the centre of an online drama when she is labelled “patient zero” and accused of infecting her colleagues and others in the town.
It marks the fifth collaboration by Komanderev with screenwriter Simeon Ventsislavov.
The largest individual funding sum awarded by MDM at this session went to Rose, the third film by Austrian writer-director Markus Schleinzer, who received €700,000. Sandra Huller is set to star in the drama which takes place during the 30 Years War. ROW Pictures is producing with The Match Factory handling international sales.
Further international filmmakers supported by MDM included Spanish director Javier Polo for his black comedy Pequenos Calvarios, which is being structured as a Spain-Mexico-Germany co-production led by Germany’s Oma Inge Film & Kultur, Finland-based Turkish director Erol Mintas for the family drama Earth Song, and Ukraine’s Eva Neymann for her documentary Bombs And Dreams, looking at the lives of the inhabitants of Odesa since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Additionally, Germany’s Federal Film Board (FFA) allocated €350,000 to Swiss filmmaker Stefan Haupt for the first screen adaptation of Max Frisch’s 1954 novel Stille, a co-production between C-Films with Munich-based Walker + Worm Film.
Titanic Ocean, the debut feature by Greek director Konstantina Kotzamanis, received €200,000 from the FFA. Cologne’s Wunderlust is the German partner with Athens-based Homemade Films on the drama set in a boarding school where teenage girls are trained to become professional mermaids.
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