New partners join Eye on Films from Croatia, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea

New partners from Croatia, Egypt, France, Poland, South Africa. and South Korea have been signed up for the Eye on Films (EoF) label.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily during this year’s Industry Days in Locarno, EoF president Loic Magneron revealed that three new festival partners – Croatia’s filmforum International Film Festival, France’s Arras Film Festival, and Egypt’s Misr International Films Youssef Chahine - have now joined the global network of over 40 festivals in 27 countries, while another four distribution partners – Poland’s Tongariro Releasing, South Africa’s Firework Media, France’s Urban Distribution, and South Korea’s Panda Media – have signed up to join over 30 distributors in 25 countries participating in the circulation of non-European films in Europe and European films in non-European countries.

In addition, the sales agent Urban Distribution International has joined EoF founder Wide Management in proposing films from its own catalogue for the EoF label lineup, and Magneron said that he had promising talks with other sales companies such as Funny Balloons and Rezo Films about the possibility of coming onboard the network.

Moreover, EoF has more new titles – Syrian-born Ala Habdalla’s documentary L’Oeil Sauvage (As If We Were Catching A Cobra) about the experiences of Egyptian and Syrian cartoonists before and after the recent political upheavals, and Christine Chansou and Vincent Trintignant-Corneau’s documentary Even A Bird Needs A Nest about forced evictions in Cambodia -  added to its initial label of 14 films

“We are going to offer new ways of exploiting these films through a VoD platform with partners in different countries,“ Magneron explained, adding that this initiative with Dailymotion is set to be launched later this autumn.

Meanwhile, coordinator Nawid Sarem revealed to ScreenDaily that the EoF network will be presenting a dedicated programme of its films at the forthcoming filmforum International Film Festival in Croatia’s Zadar (Aug 25-31) which will be accompanied by master classes given by some of the films’ young directors for film students.

This year saw EoF attending Locarno’s Industry Days for the first time and organising a workshop to introduce the network to distributors and festivals interested in spotlighting first-time directors.

The €2.1m initiative has been supported by the European Commission’s MEDIA Mundus programme in 2011 and 2012. It is designed to give more support to first-time feature films.