Serbian director Vuk Rsumovic’s No One’s Child and Slovak filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovský fiction debut Koza were the big winners at the 15th edition of the goEast Festival of Central and East European Film (April 22-28) in Wiesbaden.

No One's Child

The international jury headed by Czech producer Pavel Strnad of Negativ Film and including Filmfestival Cottbus’ artistic director Bernd Buder and Bosnian writer-director Ines Tanovic awarded the Grand Prix to Rsumovic’s feature debut which is being handled internationally by Belgrade-based Soul Food Distribution.

In addition, Achim Forst of broadcaster 3sat announced at the awards ceremony on Tuesday evening that hise channel has interest in acquiring the broadcast rights to the film.

Last year, 3sat picked up the 2014 Grand Prix winner Blind Dates and broadcast the film on the eve of this year’s goEast.

Ostrochovský’s road movie about an ex-boxer known as ¨The Goat¨ (Koza) received the City of Wiesbaden’s Prize for Best Director and the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize.

goEast is the latest stage in Koza’s successful festival career: the film won Karlovy Vary’s Works in Progress Award last year, premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum in February, and  won the Best Film Award and CICAE Prize at the Vilnius International Film Festival at the end of March.

Koza is handled internationally by the Berlin-based fledgling sales outfit Pluto Film Distribution.

Other awards included the prize of the Federal Foreign Office for Cultural Diversity to the veteran Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik for his documentary Destination_Serbistan and special mentions for Gábor Hörcher’s Drifter and Jirí Stejskal’s My Home.

For Hörcher, the recognition in Wiesbaden was like coming full circle since he had originally received the Robert Bosch Foundation’s Co-Production Prize at the festival when he had pitched Drifter as a project with the German partners Jonas and Jakob D. Weydemann of Cologne-based Weydemann Bros.

Festival briefs

  • Wroclaw’s New Horizons International Film Festival (July 23 - Aug 2) will have a country focus on Lithuania with a retrospective dedicated to the Lithuanian visionary Sarunas Bartas. In addition, there will be other retrospectives on the French, post-New Wave director Philippe Garrel, and a sidebar - #selfie - devoted to self-portraits of filmmakers and video artists.

  • FilmFestival Cottbus (Nov 3-8), the first edition under the new artistic director Bernd Buder, will feature a Focus on ¨ Eastern Europe by Cities¨ and a film programme reflecting Islam in Eastern Europe.

  • Alexey Fedorchenko’s Angels of Revolution will have its Russian premiere at the forthcoming 26th ¨Kinotavr¨ Open Russian Film Festival in Sochi (June 7-14). Fedorchenko told Screen Daily after the film’s German premiere that he is now developing a new feature film based on the Strugatsky brothers’ 1971 novel Malysh (The Kid) which is known internationally as Space Mowgli. The sci-fi drama will be handled internationally by the Russian sales company Antipode along with Fedorchenko’s previous films.

    Kinotavr’s programme director Sitora Alieva announced that 73 feature films and 408 shorts had been submitted for consideration for this year’s line-up.

    An innovation being introduced this year is a pitching event for the directors participating in the short films competition where they will have an opportunity to present their feature debuts to potential producers.

  • Russia’s first private development fund, the Point of View (P.O.V.) Film Fund, has allocated development support to another two film projects during the national festival for debuts, Dvijenie (Movement), held in Omsk last week (April 22-26).

    A jury including P.O.V. founder Sergey Selyanov (CTB), producers Artem Vasiliev (Metrafilms) and Riina Sildos (Amrion), and sales agent Jean-Christophe Simon (Films Boutique) allocated $19,000 (RUB 1m) to the
    Afghanistan-set drama Mullah (producer: Olga Ailarova, director: Kirill Mikhanovsky) which is being planned as a co-production between Russia, France and Israel.

     In addition, $15,500 (RUB 800,000) was given to the five-episode omnibus film Adolescence ID (Po-Vzroslomy) about teenagers entering adulthood in different countries, to be produced by Olga Zhirova with partners from France, Germany, Georgia and Malta.

    Adolescence ID was one of the projects presented at the goEast Development Award’s Project Market Pitch on Monday when Zhirova revealed that the feature film will be complemented by an internet contest and art exhibition.

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