The Berlinale Talent Campus's Talent Campus Abroad initiative could possibly be extended to film festivals in Sarajevo and Marrakech.

Speaking to representatives of the Berlin-Brandenburg media scene at the monthly Medien-Dialog this week, Berlinale Talent Campus (BTC) director Dorothee Wenner revealed that talks were currently being held with the festival organisers in Sarajevo and Marrakech to initiate the Talent Campus model there as well.

'We receive an incredibly large number of enquiries for a partnership and co-operations in this field,' Wenner explained. 'We think that for us and the Berlinale these are extremely important regions [the Balkans and North Africa] where we are now putting out our feelers.'

The idea of exporting the BTC model was first tried out at Kiev's Molodist International Film Festival in October 2003 and ran for two editions before the festival decided to go it alone with its own Kyiv Talent Workshop (KTW) from 2005.

In 2004, the Osian's Cinefan Film Festival in New Dehli then staged its first Talent Campus Abroad and this was followed a year later by the launch of another two Talent Campus events outside Germany: at the Sithengi Film & TV Market in South Africa's Cape Town and the Buenos Aires International Film Festival for Independent Cinema (BAFICI). The second edition of the Buenos Aires Talent Campus Abroad will now be held next month (April 12-15).

In addition, Wenner announced that the BTC was planning to collaborate with Berlin's House of World Cultures - the Campus' venue for its first four editions from 2003-2006 - on supporting the launching of film co-ops in Zimbabwe, Jordan and Manila. The idea was to provide these filmmaker cooperatives with basic infrastructural support and incentives to operate as regional activity centres.

'We hope that these regional centres will become havens for the independent film scenes in regions of the world which have a less well-developed infrastructure,' Wenner said.

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