Romania-born, Berlin-based director Cosmin Nicolae’s debut feature project Pyrrhic was the big winner at this year’s Transilvania Pitch Stop during TIFF’s industry programme.
The drama, which has already secured more than half of its €1.4m budget, was awarded €25,000 in post-production services as part of the Chainsaw Europe post-production award as well as the CoCo Award’s five-day residency from the Connecting Cottbus East-West Co-Production Market.
Nicolae’s screenplay centres on a 40-year-old woman army veteran returning from Afghanistan to her hometown on the Black Sea coast and making a harrowing discovery that could jeopardize her coming to terms with her own traumas and a drifting society.
The film’s producer Velvet Moraru of ICON Production said her company’s approach to filmmaking “has long evolved around encouraging newcomers, supporting bold perspectives and developing socially-minded projects. Pyrrhic checks all these boxes [and] will be a beneficial and inspiring contribution to the riveting post-New Wave movement happening right now in Romanian cinema.”
The €5,000 TPS development award, sponsored by the post-production house Avanpost, went to another debut feature, The Life We Never Had by Bulgarian filmmaker Martin Markov. It has already received development and production funding from Bulgaria’s National Film Centre and Creative Europe - Media.
The production by Sofia-based Portokal in partnership with the production and distribution studio No Blink, is being planned as a three-way co-production between Bulgaria and a higher production capacity country such as France and another territory from South East Europe, to shoot on location in Bulgaria from summer/autumn 2024.
Meanwhile, a new award sponsored by the Romanian collective management body UPFAR-ARGOA with a cash prize of €3,000 went to Ukrainian director-producer Olga Stuga for her very personal documentary Second Line chronicling the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on her own family since February 2022.
Stuga was one of more than 60 filmmakers supported by Docudays UA and the German Film Academy through the Filmboost scholarship programme which enabled her to buy technical equipment to shoot Second Line.
This year’s CNC Moldova Award went to Greek-German director Efthimis-Kosemund-Sanidis’ debut feature Little Death which he described during his pitch in Cluj as “a story of fathers and sons and about lovers”.
The €1.3m production by Athens-based Horsefly Films and Romania’s Tangaj Production already has partners onboard from Bulgaria, Germany and France and was looking for post-production partners, sales agents, and distributors at TPS.
The fifth project to received an award was Moldovan actor-director Valeriu Andriuta’s debut feature The Circle which was presented with the VILLA KULT development award by the initiative’s founder Renate Roginas who said the husband and wife team of Valeriu and Iulia Andriuta would also be offered accommodation at the villa in Berlin during the Berlinale in addition to the €500 support for the project’s further development.
International potential
International sales agents and producers in attendance highlighted The Circle, Little Death and two projects from Turkey - Elif Sözen’s feature debut Veha and Michael Önder’s Pastoral – as projects with international potential at the pitching session on June 16.
UK-based sales agent Denis Krupnov of Reason8 Films said he particularly liked the style of The Circle: “It has some crime elements in the story which means that it can crossover from festival to mainstream,” he explained.
“And Pastoral’s director is interesting because he was born in the UK, raised in Turkey and studied in the UK, so that would have potential for a UK co-production,” he added. “The Bulgarian comedy project The Life We Never Had is also unusual because most of the Bulgarian films from recent years have been pretty dark and depressing films.”
There was also positive feedback coming from those able to attend this year’s Closed Screenings for sales agents and festival programmers.
The four titles presented were: Nasty, Tudor Giurgiu’s documentary on the tennis ace Ilie Nastase, Marian Crisan’s Second World War drama Warboy, directing duo Gabi Virginia Sarga and Catalin Rotaru’s Where Elephants Go which was pitched at the 2022 edition of TPS and will be sold internationally by Reason8 Films, and Andrei Cohn’s Gefilte Fish, a story about anti-Semitism set in a provincial Romanian town at the beginning of the 20th century, which has France’s Shellac Films as co-producer and sales agent.
“The quality of all four films was of a very high standard and they will definitely be ones to watch,” said Freddy Olsson of Göteborg International Film Festival. Programmer Edvinas Puksta from Tallinn Black Nights rated this year’s selection as “the best we have seen for some time.”
Others attending TIFF and its industry programme for the first time also remarked favourably about the range of panels and masterclasses as well as networking opportunities on offer to accredited guests.
Los Angeles-based, UK-German producer Maya Korn, for example, found TIFF was the ideal place to pursue potential contacts for two East European-based genre film projects she is developing through her company MHK Productions.
“I was keen to learn more about the market here because I have a short film project, which could be shot either in Romania or Hungary, and a Korean-East European feature film co-production,” Korn explained. “I’ve been researching the territory because I’d most like to partner with some in Romania and this broad research helps me to see if this is the right choice.”
“I’ve met some great people from the Eastern European territories here and really enjoyed the panels to educate myself about what’s available,” she continued. “There are so many opportunities to network. The festival is not too big so you can easily bump into someone at one of the happy hours, the [festival centre] Casa TIFF or one of the evening events.”
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