Projects by Fridriksson, Cvitkovic, Ronde to be pitched at Trieste co-production market

New films from Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, Jan Cvitkovic, Gyorgy Palfi and Jeppe Ronde are among 18  projects from 13 European countries to be presented at the second edition of When East Meets West (WEMW) co-production forum (January 19-21) in Trieste, which is aimed at connecting Eastern Europe, Italy and the Nordic countries as 2012’s focus region.

The final lineup of 9 fiction and 9  documentary projects were selected  from 182 applications coming from 29 countries and cover several film genres from social drama, claymation through Nordic comedy, investigative docu-fiction to creative music documentary.

Gudrun Edde of Reykjavik-based Spellbound Production will be in Trieste with Fridriksson’s new feature project Horsemen which deals with the struggles and mystical bond existing between men and horses, while award-winning directors Cvitkovic and Palfi are attached to the omnibus project The Loss Of Innocence to be pitched by Miha Cernec of Slovenia’s Staragara.

Meanwhile, Turkish producer Derya Tarim of Lacivert Film will be looking for partners for Atil Inac’s new feature Circle which has been participating in the East European Film Alliance Training Network, and Finland’s Leila Lytikaeinen of Kinoproduction will travel to Trieste with Maarit Lalli’s Whore Bus, a project she is currently developing as part of the 21st ACE training session which was held in Potsdam this week.

In addition, Helene Granquist of Sweden’s Good World will seek to attract support for Hanna Sköld’s third film, the feature film strand of the transmedia project Granny’s Dancing On The Table, and Georgia’s Tinatin Kajrishvili will have an opportunity to present the drama Brides which was pitched during the industry meetings organised by the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Georgian National Film Center in the summer.

The selected documentary projects include Russian filmmaker Tatyana Soboleva’s Heralds From The Big World which was recently pitched by producer Vladislav Ketkovich at the East European Forum in Jihlava and during last week’s Artdocfest in Moscow; Tonislav Hristov’s IDFA 2011 Forum project, the  Bulgarian-Finnish crossmedia project Love And Engineering, to be produced by Agitprop with Making Movies; Zentropa Real’s crime investigative documentary The Quatraro Mystery by Jeppe Ronde about the bizarre death of the Italian EU official Antonio Quatrarro who fell to his death from a Brussels window in 1993; and Croatian producer-director Dana Budisavljevic’s Diana List which participated in this year’s Ex Oriente training programme and was also pitched at Jihlava’s East European Forum.

All of the selected participants will be competing for the EAVE European Producers Workshop Award for a scholarship to attend 2012’s programme of EAVE workshops.

The complete lineup of projects for the 2012 edition of When East Meets West is as follows:

Feature film projects

BRIDES Tinatin Kajrishvili (Gemini) – Georgia

BY THE POOL Gosia Sandecka (Neseser) – Poland

CIRCLE Derya Tarim (Lacivert Film) – Turkey

GRANNY’S DANCING ON THE TABLE Helene Granquist (Good World) – Sweden

HEARTSNATCHER Andrea Taschler (Mirage Film Studio) – Hungary

HORSEMEN Gudrun Edde (Spellbound Production) – Iceland

SWORN VIRGIN Alessandro Usai (Colorado Film) – Italy

THE LOSS OF INNOCENCE Miha Cernec (Staragara) - Slovenia/Italy/Croatia/Austria/Hungary

WHOREBUS Leila Lytikaeinen (Kinoproduction) – Finland  

Documentary projects

3xTONINO Klara Bjoerk (Filmkreatoerna) – Sweden  

ALL THAT REMAINS Dorino Minigutti (Agherose) – Italy  

BOSNIA EXPRESS Massimo D’Orzi (Il Gigante) – Italy  

DIANA’S LIST Dana Budisavljevic (Hulahop) – Croatia  

HERALDS FROM THE BIG WORLD Vladislav Ketkovich (Ethnogeographic Research Foundation) – Russia  

LOVE AND ENGINEERING Kaarle Aho (Making Movies) – Finland  

MY WORLD IS UPSIDEDOWN Petra Seliskar (Petra Pan) – Slovenia  

THE QUATRARO MYSTERY Peter Engel (Zentropa Real) – Denmark  

THE UNDERTAKER Jovana Nikolic (Prababa Production) – Serbia  

Meanwhile, WEMW’s organisers, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Audiovisual Fund and the Trieste Film Festival, have said that, due to the large number of applications and their high quality, the 2012 edition will introduce another category of projects, the so-called “warm-up & follow-up selection”, alongside the 18 projects selected for public pitching.

“This special lineup will include both extremely promising projects at a very early stage of development and well-structured projects already presented at the main European co-production markets,“ WEMW explained, adding that these projects’ producers would be invited to attend the forum and have one-to-one meetings with the attending decision-makers.

The pitching forum will be complemented by a series of roundtables featuring such industry figures as Anthony Muir (Film i Väst), Brigitta Manthey (Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg), Sigurros Hilmarsdottir (Icelandic Film Centre), Gunnar Carlsson (SVT), Frank Stavik (Fidalgo) and Ivar Kohn (Norwegian Film Institute).

The first edition of WEMW last January had included such projects as Horatiu Malaele’s comedy Happy Funeral, Vinko Möderndorfer’s drama Inferno and the documentaries Sofia’s Last Ambulance by Ilian Metev and Velvet Terrorists by Peter Kerekes.