Projects from the Benelux, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were among the award-winners at the ninth edition of Trieste’s When East Meets West (WEMW) co-production forum (January 20-22).
The International Jury, which included Cinéfondation’s Georges Goldenstern, Slovak director Peter Kerekes and ACE’s Jacobine van der Vloed presented the Film Center Development Award with a cash prize of €5,000 ($5,670) to Francesco Montagner’s documentary Brotherhood, to be produced by Prague-based Nutprodukce with Italy’s Nefertiti Film.
The Flow Postproduction Award with €15,000 ($17,012) in postproduction facilities went to Slovak filmmaker Michal Blasko for his mother-son drama Victim which is being planned by Nutprodukce’s Bratislava-based sister company, Nutprodukcia, as a co-production with the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
In addition, Victim’s producer Jakub Victorin was selected by the EAVE training programme to receive a scholarship to attend the producers’ workshop in the future.
Two free accreditations to the Cannes Producers Network in May were awarded to Magalie Dierick, a junior producer at Ghent-based Cassette for timescapes, who had pitched Volkan Üce’s documentary All-In at the co-production forum, and to Dutch producer Derk-Jan Warrink who was in Trieste with filmmaker Floor van der Meulen to present her feature debut Methusalem to potential partners.
Van der Meulen - who won the Best European Short Film Award at the European Film Awards for 9 Days - From My Window In Aleppo in 2016 - was also presented with the European Women’s Audiovisual Network Award which was given for the third time at WEMW this year.
Meanwhile, the Greek one-stop marketing agency Asterisk gave its Visual Marketing Prize to Polish filmmaker Anna Kazejak’s fourth feature project Her/His which had also been presented at Wroclaw’s Polish Days last July. The €1.8m ($2.04m) marital drama is being produced by Mariusz Wlodarski of Lodz-based Lava Films, a former Screen Future Leader and Producer on the Move in Cannes.
New award
This year’s edition of WEMW also saw the announcement of the first two projects to be supported by the new Italian-Baltic Co-Production Development Award which had been unveiled during the Baltic Event in Tallinn last November.
Eight applications were submitted for consideration by a jury of funders from Italy and the three Baltic states. The first two projects to each receive €15,000 ($17,012) co-development funding are:
- Ultramondo, a fiction film for young audiences to be produced by Italy’s Solaria Film with Lithuania’s Fralita Films
- Searching For Antigravity, to be produced by Lithuania’s Studio Nominum with Italy’s Giuma Produzioni, Latvia’s VFS Films and France’s Les Films Figures Libres as partners.
The ninth edition of WEMW presented 22 film projects from 14 countries, which had been selected from 299 submissions coming from 49 countries.
In addition, the co-production forum invited two guest projects from partner events: Brazilian Julio Adamor’s My Grandpa Made Porn, previously pitched at DOCSP Brazil, and UK filmmaker and visual artist Vicki Thornton’s (N)Ostalgia which was presented at the 2016 Baltic Event where it won the Screen International Best Pitch Award.
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