Vienna-based sales agent EastWest Distribution has picked up six new titles including Rotterdam premiere Whispers Behind The Wall.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily at this week’s When East Meets West in Trieste, EastWest’s Sasha Wieser said that two of these titles will be screening in the festival programmes of Rotterdam and Berlin.

Polish-born Grzegorz Muskala’s dark psychological thriller Whispers Behind The Wall - a young law student falls for the charms of his enigmatic Berlin landlady with terrifying consequences - will have its international premiere in Rotterdam tomorrow in the Bright Future programme.

The feature debut is the first full in-house production of Sol Bondy’s Berlin-based One Two Films and Muskala’s graduation film from the German Film & Television Academy Berlin (dffb). It had its world premiere at the Filmfest Oldenburg last September and won the prize for Best Musical Score at the Kinofest Lünen in November.

Bondy was one of Screen International’s Future Leaders Producers at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and co-produced the Israeli film Youth, screened at Berlin’s Panorama in 2013 and now being released theatrically in Germany by Port-au-Prince Pictures this week.

Fever in Panorama

Meanwhile, director-cinematographer Elfie Mikesch will have the world premiere of her new feature film Fever (Fieber), starring Eva Mattes and Martin Wuttke, in Berlin’s Panorama.

Fever  had been presented by Amour Fou Vienna’s Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu at the 2013 edition of the When East Meets West co-production meetings in Trieste. Principal photography followed as a co-production between Amour Fou Luxembourg and Amour Fou Vienna  in Luxembourg, Austria, South Tyrol and Serbia in summer 2013.

Amour Fou returned to Trieste this year with another project - this time from Amour Fou Luxembourg:

  • Bady Minck’s docu-science fiction 1313 - Dante’s Emperor.

The other market premieres to be shown by EastWest at the EFM are:

  • Maria Douza’s Greek-Serbian co-production A Place Called Home, starring Myrto Alikaki, Mirjana Karanovic and Elias Logothetis, which was shown at festivals in Montreal, Goa and Chennai.

  • Lola Randl’s The Invention Of Love  about an eccentric menage à trois, which screened at the Filmfest München and won the Best Director Award at the Münster Film Festival.

  • Polish film-maker Mikolaj Haremski’s family adventure film Gabriel, shown at the Montreal World Film Festival and the Schlingel International Film Festival for Children and Young People.

  • André Erkau’s black comedy Life’s No Piece Of Cake, with Wotan Wilke Möhring and Helen Woigk. Veteran actress Christie Schorn received a Lola for her supporting role as the mother Gerlinde.

Rise and Shine enters Unknown Territory

Berlin-based Rise and Shine World Sales has secured international distribution rights for Anna Thommen’s documentary Unknown Territory (Neuland), which won the First Steps Award for Best Documentary last September and will have a special screening within the Berlinale’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino sidebar on the festival’s last day (Feb 16).

Unknown Territory - which follows new pupils coming from different countries and often traumatic backgrounds to study in an integration class in Basle, Switzerland - also won the Documentary Prize at the Zurich Film Festival and the Audience Award in Berne.

Thommen’s film is also screening in the Documentary Competition of this week’s Max Ophüls Prize Film Festival for up-and-coming German-language cinema.

Austrian horror film wins three Austrian Film Awards

Meanwhile, another film competing at the Max Ophüls festival in Saarbrücken in the Feature Film Competition, Marvin Kren’s horror film The Station (Blutgletscher), took home three of the sculptures designed by Valie Export at this year’s Austrian Film Awards held in Lower Austria’s Grafenegg this week.

The Allegro Film production, which is being distributed internationally by Rezo Films International, received the awards for Best Actor, Best Make-Up and Best Sound Design.

However, the evening’s big winner at the fourth Austrian Film Awards ceremony was writer-director Hüseyin Tabak’s immigration drama Your Beauty Is Worth Nothing (Deine Schönheit ist nichts wert), picking up the gongs for Best Feature Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay and Best Music Score.

Tabak’s first feature sees the challenges of immigration in Austria as seen from the perspective of a 12-year-old Turkish boy and had its world premiere at last year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Other awards went to the documentary Meine keine Familie, Shirley - Visions of Reality,  and to Maria Hofstätter for her performance in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Faith. (ends)

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