Projects from Rwanda, Greece, Malta and Bulgaria were among the prize winners at the seventh edition of European Works in Progress (EWIP) in Cologne this week.
An international jury including Edinburgh International Film Festival director Paul Ridd and distributor Sophia Stejskal of Austria’s Filmladen awarded in-kind prizes worth a total of €60,000.
Greek filmmaker Alexis Alexiou and his producer Elina Psykou received €10,000 from K13 Studios for Dolby Atmos mixing of his €1.1m crime thriller Sea Of Glass, described as a cross between The Postman Always Rings Twice and Thelma And Louise.
Maja Classen’s documentary Truth Of Dare, exploring desire in Berlin’s queer sex positive party scene, was awarded €5,000 worth of dubbing services from K13 Studios.
Produced by Saralisa Volm’s German outfit Poison, Truth Of Dare will have its world premiere in the German Documentary Competition at the forthcoming DOK Leipzig.
Bulgarian director Stephan Komanderev and German producer Eike Goreczka won the €10,000 prize from Cologne-based MMC Studios for stage and room rental services for their social drama project Made In EU.
Maltese-American filmmaker Alex Camilleri was awarded the €5,000 prize from MMC Studios for stage and room hire for his musical Żejtune. It is being co-produced by Berlin-based One Two Films who were present at EWIP last year with the Norwegian project Armand. winner of the Camera d’Or in Cannes this year.
Further in-kind prizes included LAVAlabs Moving Images Award offering up €10,000 of work on visual effects for Japanese director Akio Fujimoto’s refugee drama Lost Land, and the audience design award from Torino Film Lab (TFL) of two sessions with experts to design a marketing and distribution strategy was presented to Rwandan writer-director Mbabazi Sharangabo Philbert Aimé’s debut feature Minimals In A Titanic World.
The latter was pitched as part of EWIP’s Focus on Africa. A further project from Focus on Africa, the documentary Truck Mama by Kenyan writer-director-producer-DoP Zipporah “Zippy” Nyarur, received the €7,500 prize in international festival publicity work from the Berlin-based PR agency mm filmpresse.
Meanwhile Thailand-based writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s dark fantasy-comedy A Useful Ghost won €4,000 worth of subtitling services from Way Film.
Spanish director Ion de Sosa’s fantasy drama Balearic was awareded the €5,000 in-kind prize for marketing and technology support from K media tech company Gruvi , and Norwegian director Paul Magnus Lundø’s third feature The Badgers, a family adventure inspired by his childhoods days as a Scout, won the inaugural €5,000 award of services from usheru to build a premium discovery web platform.
EWIP’s line-up of 29 works in progress also included Benjamin Heisenberg’s children’s comedy The Prank, Dutch sci-fi comedy Straight Outta Space, described as “Mars Attacks meets Dawn Of The Dead”, and German writer-director Hille Norden’s drama Small Town Girl, previously known as Fucking Freedom.
EWIP is now followed by the third edition of the International Distribution Summit (IDS) with keynotes by speakers including Kota Tokada, head of acquisition at Japan’s Sundae/Filmarks, Jen Davies, co-CEO of the UK’s Conic, and David Larkin, head of business for Letterboxd.
Gabriele D’Andrea, director of marketing and theatrical distribution for Italian distributor Lucky Red will give a masterclass on “tradition, diversity and innovation to develop great connections between films and audiences”. D’Andrea is the recipient of this year’s international innovation distribution award. He receives €10,000 of services offered by Comscore, usheru and Gruvi in a prize that recognises the efforts of international distributors to bring quality films to audiences through innovative and groundbreaking new models and strategies.
Launched in 2022, the two previous recipients were Elissa Federoff of US distributor Neon and Enrique Costa of Spain’s Elastica Films.
European Work In Progress Cologne ran from October 14-16 as part of the Cologne FIlm Festival.
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