Switzerland’s Ibicaba - Visions Of Paradise directed by Andrea Štaka has scooped the top prize at the Berlinale Co-Production Market.
The feature won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, worth €20,000, which went to Cinédokké & Okofilm Productions.
Štaka is best known for her 2006 Locarno Golden Leopard winner Das Fräulein. Her most recent feature was 2020’s Mare starring Marija Škaričić.
A further four cash awards and one in-kind prize was awarded to feature film projects at the market, which ran February 15-19.
A prize also worth €20,000 was donated by Eurimages to support a promising Ukrainian project: the Eurimages Special Co-production Development Award. It went to the Ukrainian company Tabor, represented by producer Daria Zakharova, for the project The Earth Is Flat – I Flew Around And Saw It by Maksym Nakonechnyi, director of Cannes 2022 Un Certain Regard title Butterfly Vision.
The first-ever Gen Z Audience Award, worth €5,000, went to 30 Days Of Summer by producer Aleksandra Kostina (Bosonfilm), also from Ukraine. The jury was made up of five film students from German and French film universities and is targeted at a feature aimed at audiences aged 20-28.
The VFF Talent Highlight Award of €10,000 – promoting one promising project from the Talent Project Market – went to Alberto Gross Molo’s March 14th, pitched by producer Laura Egidos Plaja (from Spain’s Contraria Media).
This year’s ARTEKino International Award went to Kaan Müjdeci’s Dreamgirl, produced by Tato Film & Asteros Film (Turkey). This €6,000 award is presented to an “artistically outstanding project” from the co-pro market.
For the third time, in-kind prize the World Cinema Fund Audience Strategies Award was given to a project from a WCF-supported country. It was awarded to the producers of Lebanon’s Abbout Productions and director Wissam Tanios for their project The Sun Sees Everything.
This year’s jury comprised funding representative Eleni Chandrinou (National Representative of Greece to Eurimages), distributor Øistein Refseth (Mer Film, Norway) and producer Labina Mitevska (Sisters and Brother Mitevski, North Macedonia).
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