Bugboy

Source: Courtesy of TIDF

‘Bugboy’

Highways Of Hope by Hungarian director Alexa Bakony and producer Veronika Gál of Budapest-based Filmfabriq, about a woman who leaves her home in India to drive trucks across Europe, was awarded the €10,000 development prize of the Agora industry programme at the 2025 Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s (TIDF) on March 14.

Greek director Lucas Paleocrossos’ Bugboy, chronicling a teenager’s unlikely friendship with insects and his journey of self -discovery, picked up the Onassis Film Award and a special mention from the jury.

Producer Rea Apostolides of Anemon Productions revealed the co-production with Denmark’s Toolbox Film and France’s Flach Film will also yield a short documentary series for children in addition to the theatrical and TV versions.

Further awards were presented to filmmakers including Greek producer Mina Dreki of Marni Films and visual artist Doreida Xhogu who won the ERT - Thessaloniki pitching forum award for Mama Klorin about the community of immigrant women working as cleaners in Greece, and Ana Sofia Fonseca and Daniella Rice of Portugal’s Carrossel Producoes who received the EURODOC award for their third collaboration Taken By The White Man, which follows a man’s quest to find his brother almost 60 years after being captured by the Portuguese army during the colonial war in Mozambique in 1967.

Turkish filmmaker Hazal Hanquet’s debut documentary feature My Aunties, charting the love and friendship between the director’s two aunts Aysin and Asli over four decades, won the Aylon Productions digital services award and DOK Leipzig accelerator award

The team were at Agora looking for European co-producers the film’s subject matter means that the producers will be unable to access local funding in Turkey.

Two further pitching forum award-winners addressed the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community in their respective countries.

Georgian director Ana Kvichidze and producer Avtandil Khorava of Moonbow Productions were presented with the Mediterranean Film Institute Award offering a scholarship to attend this year’s MFI Script2Film Workshop for Oh, Heart Don’t Be Afraid about a transgender person rejected by their family, while one of the DAE - Documentary Association of Europe’s consultancies was awarded to Anthoniy Hristov’s Life On Pause, which will be the first feature documentary to be made by a transgender director in Bulgaria. It follows the intertwined stories of three young transgender people fighting for acceptance and equal rights to be able to change their name and gender on their personal documents.

A second DAE consultancy was given to the Polish-Belarusian husband and wife team of Jan Jurczak and Eleanora Iadkouskaya for their debut feature documentary The Last Summer charting the lives of teenagers living near the Ukrainian-Belarussian border against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Project highlights

Bugboys was one of the five projects to catch the eye of Jan Rofekamp, the Athens-based international documentary executive producer, who formerly ran his company Films Transit International.

The others were Mama Klorin from Greece, as well as Polish director Michal Marczak’s Closure about a father’s quest for his missing son who vanished from a Warsaw bridge, UK-based Kinda Kurdi’s debut documentary feature Memoirs Of Jerusalem which is being co-produced by UK producer Brian Hill through his company Century Films, and Christos Karakepelis’ Future Tenses about working class communities in three Chinese-owned ports around the globe.

Rofekamp noted that while many films that were pitched at Agora were very personal stories, these five had the potential to “speak to a global audience”.

Many professionals were attending TIDF’sAgora for the first time.

“I was very impressed by the quality of projects from this region and I am now working on a deal sales-wise for a couple of them,” said an G. Castro of Netherlands-based sales company and theatrical distributor Latin Quarter.

Ana Cruz of the UK-based sales agent Impronta Films whose catalogue includes such titles as Ulises de la Orden’s The Trial and Ehshan Khoshkakht’s Celluloid Underground, also spoke highly of the selection of projects as well as “the many opportunities to meet people at the various networking events”.

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