Eleven Flowers, a project to be directed by Wang Xiaoshuai and produced by Isabelle Glachant, was awarded a production grant of $46,000 (50,000 swiss francs) at the Locarno Film Festival’s 2009 Open Doors Factory.

The grant was awarded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which also gave development grants to two other projects: Bus No. 8, to be directed and produced by Yang Qing, and Don’t Expect Praises, to be directed by Yang Jin and produced by Helen Cui for Beijing-based Tianlin Film Production.

The two development grants are each worth $14,000 (15,000 swiss francs). The jury decided to present two development grants because many of the projects are still at the writing and development stage.

The jury included Walter Ruggle and Martial Knaebel, representing Swiss support fund “visions sud est”, and the Locarno film festival’s Vincenzo Bugno and Luciano Barisone.

The four-day Open Doors co-production lab, which features a different filmmaking region each year, this year focused on Greater China with 12 projects selected out of 114 applications from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

“We selected twelve high-quality projects, all of them very different from one another in terms of form and content. We were proud to see that they created a great interest in the many producers from all countries participating in the one-to-one meetings. We are now eagerly waiting to see the films on screen,” said Locarno director Frédéric Maire.

Topics