Vyborg to show Stalin drama

The 83-year-old Russian poet will come to Vyborg – 38km from the border with Finland – and meet with the festival audience to talk about his life’s work as well as to present Stalin’s Funeral (Pokhorony Stalina), which openly attacked the evils of Stalinism and celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year.

Co-Production Competition

Bakur Bakuradze’s Russian-Serbian co-production Brother Dejan, which has its world premiere in Locarno’s International Competition this afternoon (Aug 6), is one of ten titles selected for Vyborg’s Co-Production Competition to be judged by actor-producer Alexey Guskov, Two Women producer Natalia Ivanova and the Armenian-born writer Narine Abgarian.

Other titles include Johnny O’Reilly’s Russian-Irish co-production Moscow Never Sleeps, Oleg Taktarov, Alexander Mosin and Valery Ibragimov’s St Petersburg/Las Vegas-set adventure film An Oil Painting, and Mikhail Kosyrev-Nesterov’s Russian-French A Trip To The Mother.

The 23^rd edition of “Window On Europe” opens tomorrow evening (Aug 7) with the world premiere of In the Far Forty Fifth… Meetings on Elbe directed by Mira Todorovskaya and Petro Aleksovsky.

The war drama had been written by Todorovskaya’s late husband Pyotr Todorovsky based on his own experiences as a young soldier at the end of the Second World War in 1945

Todorovsky had presented the project at the second edition of the Moscow Business Square’s Co-Production Forum in 2011.

Apart from competition sections for new Russian feature films, documentaries and animation films, the festival is also a co-organiser of a meeting between Russian and Finnish producers and film funders on August 13 and 14 in Vyborg and the Finnish town of Kotka.

The two-day event, which was announced during this year’s Moscow Business Square in June, will be attended by such leading industry figures as MRP’s Ilkka Matila, Natalia Drozd of the P.O.V. Fund, Vita Aktiva’s Julia Mishkenene, Alexei Riazantcev, managing director of Caro Premiere, Klaus Heidemann of Inland Film Company Oy, and Andrey Dreyabin of The Hermitge Bridge Studio.

Venice showcase for Russian cinema

Ivan Tverdovsky’s award-winning Corrections Class, Jury Feting’s children’s film Celestial Camel and the Russian-Ukrainian blockbuster Battle for Sevastopol (known in Ukraine as Unbreakable) are among 20 films being presented by Roskino’s DOORS International Travelling Film Market at next month’s Venice Film Market.

The line-up of films produced and released between 2013 and 2015 will also include Alexandr Proshkin’s Earthly Eden, which had a Special Screening at the Moscow International Film Festival in June, Maxim Fadeev’s animated feature Savva: Heart of the Warrior, featuring Milla Jovovich, Sharon Stone and Joe Pesci among the voices in the English version, and Dmitry Meskhiev’s war drama Battalion about the establishment of the 1^st Russian Women’s Battalion, the so-called Death Battalion, as part of an ill-conceived propaganda ploy by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917.

Roskino, who will have such companies as Bazelevs, Central Partnership, Lenfilm and Rock Films represented on its market stand, is joining forces with the Venice Film Market to launch a pitching forum on September 6 for projects looking to co-produce with Russia.

A jury of experts will decide on the project with the greatest festival and commercial potential to receive a $5,000 project development grant sponsored by Roskino and to be announced during a subsequent co-production event at the Toronto Film Festival.