UK-based Taskovski Films has picked up international sales for two documentaries which will world premiere this month at CPH:DOX and at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival.
Taskovski Films has boarded German filmmaker Jens Schanze’s Materia Prima which has its world premiere in CPH:DOX’s Right Here, Right Now and F:ACT competition sections on March 12.
Produced by Schanze’s own company Mascha Film as a co-production with Thomas Thielsch’s Filmtank, the observational documentary shot over six years from 2020 and centres on a new gold rush sparked by the world’s largest lithium deposits in the Bolivian Andes where global interests collide and 500 years of colonial history continue to haunt the present.
“We face the scale of global powers shaping the lives of everyday people more than ever,” Irena Taskovski, head of acquisitions at Taskovski Films, said. “Materia Prima explores this on a striking level, as Jens Schanze shows that politics, history, and progress are not abstract concepts - they touch real lives.”
She pointed out that the film’s “multi-perspective, observational approach ensures that this is not a narrative imposed from the outside, but rather a space in which all included articulate their own, sometimes conflicting, voices and positions”.
Schanze’s previous feature documentary La Buena Vida - Das Gute Leben premiered in 2015 and won awards at festivals in Germany, Poland, the US and France as well as receiving the Bavarian Film Award for best documentary in 2016.
Taskovski Films is also handling international sales on Slovak director Tomáš Krupa’s We Have To Survive which will have its world premiere on March 11 in the Open Horizons section at this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (March 5-15).
The Slovakian-French-Austrian co-production by Krupa’s Hailstone with Christian Popp’s YUZU Productions and Vienna-based Golden Girls Film was shot in brutal conditions across oceans, ice and desert of a changing Earth – from the fragile Outer Banks of the USA and the vast Mongolian desert to the underground town of Coober Pedy in Australia and the icy shores of Greenland.
We Have to Survive uses intimate, character-driven stories to reveal not only the challenges of a changing world, but the quiet strength of those living through it.
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