Projects from Agnieszka Holland, Tomas Vengris and Dzintars Dreibergs are among 24 being pitched at a new co-production forum focusing on filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe at Warsaw’s Heart of Europe international festival from November 15-17.
Holland’s six-part series Emma, is inspired by the true story of Emma Altrichterová, the first female colonel in the Czech Army who embarked on a dangerous mission to save 40 children from advancing German troops during the Second World War.
It is being produced by Jan Maxa, director of content and new media at Czech TV, who will be at the forum to look for co-producers and pre-sales for the €9m project.
Germany’s Beta Film is co-producing; the writers are Mirka Zlatníková and Radek Baigar.
It marks a return to working in the Czech Republic for the Polish director who studied at the renowned FAMU film school in Prague at the end of the 1960s. She has previously shot the three-part HBO series Burning Bush in 2013 and the award-winning film Charlatan in the country,
Lithuanian director Tomas Vengris is presenting feature project Bijuterie which is now at a late stage of development. Produced by Emilija Sluskonyte of Vilnius-based Cometos, it is based on the true story of a young Lithuanian woman and set in the dark world of the Soviet Lithuanian mafia at the beginning of the 1990s and in the Bologna of present-day Italy.
Vengris, who has also worked as an editor for directors such as Terrence Malick and Kelly Reichhardt, made his feature directorial debut with Motherland which premiered in Busan in 2019 after having been pitched at Tallinn’s Baltic Event co-production market in 2015.
A female protagonist is also at the centre of Latvian director Dreiberg’s sports drama Escape Net. It will pitched by the up-and-coming producer Marta Romanova-Jekabsone who is currently participating in this year’s ACE producers mentoring programme.
Escape Net is inspired by the true story of a young girl from Stalin-era Riga who created the most successful women’s basketball team in European history as a way of escaping the USSR to be reunited with her refugee brother abroad.
The Co-Production Forum’s 24 projects will be presented in three pitching sessions of feature films, TV fiction series and documentaries to an audience of potential financiers.
The selection includes seven projects from Ukrainian production companies. The Russia-Ukraine war provides the backdrop for producer-director Egor Olesov’s family drama Daughter as well as Artem Lytynenko’s documentary World War Cyber about the deployment of cyber warfare techniques and a shift in the economy of war through crypto-currency. Max Bernadsky’s The End Of “Moskva” chronicles how the flagship of the Russian fleet was sunk after being struck by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles.
In addition, Lesia Diak’s debut documentary Dad’s Lullaby centres on the family life of a veteran traumatised by the Russian-Ukrainian war that began in 2014 and the devastating consequences of the war on fragile family relationships.
Other projects being pitched over the three-day event organised by the Polish public broadcaster TVP include the Hungarian satirical comedy Sauna World by Fanni Hatházi about Central European unique wellness culture, Slovak filmmaker Diana Fabiánová’s highly personal documentary Boundaries of Fidelity which is described as “an intimate probe into society, partnerships, their dark places and our innermost selves”, and The Golden Hour, a six-part TV series structured over three seasons about three semi-retirees who take on a corrupt mafia-backed property developer in Romania.
The pitching sessions will also be complemented by a series of panel discussions on such issues as the export potential for local content from Central and Eastern Europe as well as the importance of regional alliances in the global co-production market and co-producing with Ukraine.
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