Emerging Producers named at Jihlava doc film festival

A total of 19 up-and-coming players in the European creative documentary have been selected for the second edition of the Emerging Producers platform during this year’s Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Oct 24-29).

The 2013 line-up includes:

• Portuguese producer Joana Gusmao [pictured], who is preparing André Gil Mata’s The Tree to shoot in Sarajevo this December;
  
  
• Polish producer-director Jacob Dammas whose Polish Illusions was shown at Hot Docs and CPH:DOX;
  
  
• France’s Karim Aitouna who received the Robert Bosch Stiftung Co-Production Prize for his project A Place In The Sun;
  
  
• Berlin-based Michel Balagué of Mengamuk Films who produced Marcin Malasczcak’s Sieniawka, which premiered at the Berlinale last February. Balagué is now developing a second film with Malasczcak as a co-production between Germany, Poland and the UK;
  
  
• Croatia’s Morana Komljenovic who served as a co-producer on Nebojsa Slijepcovic’s Gangster Of Love.

Divided into three parts - promotion, networking and navigaton - the initiative places great emphasis on informal meetings between the participants and also organises one-to-one meeting with professionals attending Jihlava’s Industry Programme in order to explore the potential for future international cooperation

The young talents are given a grounding in the latest developments in the international film market through masterclasses, case studies and lectures.

The event is again organised by MEDIA Desks in Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, and the MEDIA Antennas of Berlin-Brandenburg, Catalunya and Torino.

Full list of Emerging Producers:

• Filip Antoni Malinowski, Austria
• Nina Pehlivanova, Bulgaria
• Morana Komljenović, Croatia
• Pavla Kubečková, Czech Republic
• Pavlína Kalandrová, Czech Republic
• Jacob Krarup, Denmark
• Elina Litvinova, Estonia
• Michel Balagué, Germany
• Julianna Ugrin, Hungary
• Federico Minetti, Italy
• Madara Melberga, Latvia
• Dagne Vildziunaite, Lithuania
• Karim Aitouna, France
• Jacob Dammas, Poland
• Joana Gusmão, Portugal
• Barbara Hessová, Slovakia
• Marina Gumzi, Slovenia
• Aritz Cirbian, Spain
• Aline Schmid, Switzerland

World premieres

Jihlava’s festival programme features 21 world premieres including The Uprising, a compilation of amateur videos from the Arab Spring; Latvian film My Family Tree; Bohdan Bláhovec’s Show!, about the creation of the girl band 5Angels; Pavel Štingl’s Eugenic Minds on the ideals of eugenics in the hands of the Nazis; and Petr Hátle’s Great Night produced with HBO Europe, among others.

Other highlights include masterclasses organised as part of the Ex Oriente Film workshop’s open programme with the award-winning US director-cinematographer Kirsten Johnson and Israel’s Eyan Sival, director of The Specialist - Portrait of a Modern Criminal about Adolf Eichmann.

More details can be found here www.dokument-festival.cz

Leipzig Co-Production meeting

As Jihlava begins to wind down, a number of professionals will be taking the Jihlava-Leipzig Express bus shuttle on Oct 27 to attend the 56th DOK Leipzig festival (Oct 28-Nov 3) and its Co-Production Meeting (Oct 28-29).

The Co-Production Meeting’s 9th edition has a special focus on working with Brazil and Israel, with delegations of producers from the two countries coming to Germany to discuss collaboration on specific projects.

According to the organisers, 230 projects were submitted for the Co-Production Meeting and, after three weeks of deliberation, 34 projects were selected, with almost half coming from Germany or having a German partner as a co-producer as well as a co-production between Afghanistan and the UK (The School That Never Is) and six projects from Israel (from Shooting Holy Land  to Just Kids).

Leipzig’s extensive industry programme will also include a showcase of ‘rough cuts’ in the DOK.Inkubator section with screenings of such projects as Scottish director Lou McLoughlan’s 16 Years Til Summer, produced by Iceland’s Zik Zak Filmworks; London-based Vernon Films’ Chuck Norris vs Communism by Ilinca Calugareanu about the illegal distribution of over 3,000 US films on VHS tapes in Communist Romania of the 1980s;

Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie’s In Country about a platoon of soldiers recreating the Vietnam War in the woods of Oregon; and Kristof Kovacs’ account in Men With Balls of how tennis and gardening came to a remote Roma village in Hungary.

Festival showing 343 films from 57 countries

DOK Leipzig will open on October 28 with the screening of Marc Bauder’s Master of the Universe, which premiered in Locarno’s Semaine de la Critique in August where it won the Prix SRG SSR as Best Film.

The festival’s International Documentary Competition presents 12 films from 14 countries with world premieres of new productions by two master documentary film-makers: In Sarmatia by Germany’s Volker Koepp and Optical Axis by Russia’s Maria Razbezhkina, as well as international premieres of Gang Zhao’s A Folk Troupe (China), Aneta Kopacz’s Joanna (Poland), and Yael Kipper and Ronen Zaretzky’s Super Women about life for low-paid cashiers in a Tel Aviv supermarket.

The Competition will also feature the European premiere of Dane Jon Bang Carlsen’s Just The Right Amount Of Violence and the German premiere of Vitaly Mansky’s award-winning Pipeline.

In addition to a Country Focus on Brazil - as part of the Germany-Brazil cultural year - the festival has a retrospective on uprisings and revolutions, homages to the film-makers Wendy Morris from South Africa, Switzerland’s Peter Liechti and East German Peter Voigt, as well as showcases of work from the UK’s GPO and the Canadian National Film Board.

In total, 343 films from 57 countries will be shown after the selection committee viewed some 2,150 titles from more than 100 countries.

More details of the DOK Leipzig programme can be found at www.dok-leipzig.de.