A Moldovan-Romanian directorial debut and a documentary from Azerbaijan won the top prizes at this year’s When East Meets West (WEMW) co-production forum, which was held in the Italian city of Trieste from January 21-24.
Moldovan director Dragos Turea’s debut feature Lenin’s Pawn won the €5,000 Film Center Serbia Award. A joint production by Moldova’s Parmis Film and Romania’s Project UM, Lenin’s Pawn follows a Moldovan actor struggling between his nation’s Soviet past and its European aspirations as he attempts to dismantle Lenin’s monuments.
Lala Aliyeva’s documentary Strange Sea won the €5,000 Ciclic WEMW Award granted by the French Centre-Val de Loire Region. Strange Sea offers a glimpse at the fears and aspirations of people dwelling on the Caspian Sea shore while also touching upon the director’s own fear of the Sea. Produced by Azerbaijan’s Yaman Film, this is Aliyeva’s first feature-length documentary.
Azerbaijan was represented again with a special jury mention going to the Georgian-Azerbaijani documentary project The Amateur Photographer’s Family Portrait. Director Nurlan Hasanli and producer Irina Gelshvili (Radium Films) also received the DAE Talent Development Prize, in cooperation with the European Film Market.
The 14th edition of WEMW featured 21 projects, comprising nine fiction features, nine feature-length documentaries, and three animated shorts from 18 countries. Over 550 participants attended from 60 countries.
This year marked the second outing for the European Women’s Audiovisual (EWA) Network’s Award for Equality and Inclusion which went to Ukrainian director Tetiana Khodakivska’s sophomore documentary feature The Blue Sweater With A Yellow Hole, produced by Elena Saulich, Pronto Film with Moon Man and Babylon’13.
Greek producer Maria Kontogianni, of Wild At Heart, who presented her project Hystera, received a scholarship to attend the EAVE Producers Workshop while Let It Roll producer Rafaella Costa, of Brazil’s Manjericão Filmes, was awarded free access to the Cannes Marché du Film Producers’ Network.
Agata Wieczorek, director of Joy (Futur Antérieur Production, France), received the Pop Up Film Residency Award, while the Ricardo Rueles-directed documentary The Broken R, produced by Ecuador’s Incubadora and Italy’s Small Boss, received the new #DocsConnect Taskovski Training Award. The Laser Film Post-production Award was awarded to Czech director Barbara Chalupova’s Turquoise Mountain (Nochi Film, Czech Republic).
Coming to the works-in-progress sections that recognise films in post-production stages, this edition introduced the €2,000 Film Center Montenegro Award which went to Blueberry Dreams by Elene Mikaberidze and producer Elene Margvelashvili (Parachute Films). The €1,000 HBO Europe Award went to HBO Europe Award (a € 1.000 cash prize) to Dad’s Lullaby, a Ukrainian-Romanian-Croatian project by director Lesia Diak and producers Lesia Diak, Monica Lazurean Gorgan, Elena Martin (DramaFree, Filmways, Petnaesta umjetnost).
The international jury of This Is IT, the works-in-progress section dedicated to films co-produced with Italy or produced by any of the WEMW spotlight regions, granted the Video Award and a cash prize worth €5,000, to the Italian-Sri Lankan-French co-production Still Here by Suranga D Katugampala.
In First Cut+, the works in progress targeting feature films that previously took part in a First Cut Lab workshop, Czech filmmaker Martin Pavol Repka’s feature debut March To May won the € 5,000 TRT Prize.
The Italy-Baltic Development Awards for Co-Production awarded cash prizes including €30,000 to Vaalo Tooml’s Italian-Estonian project Beatrice. Awards worth €7,500 each were given to Aurora Mischi’s Italian-Latvian project The Waterline and Sarunas Mikulskis’s Lithuanian-Italian effort Hermann’s Hope.
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