Polish writer-director Sonja Orlewicz-Zakrzewska’s debut feature Dolphin was voted as the best pitch at the 24th edition of the East-West Co-Production Market Connecting Cottbus (coco, November 9-11), which took place during FilmFestival Cottbus.
Orlewicz-Zakrzewska and her producer Magdalena Sztorc of Warsaw-based Before My Eyes also received the Croatian Audiovisual Centre’s Project Development Award of € 5,000 toward the project’s further development.
The project, described as “an intimate dramedy with a surreal touch”, sees a singer’s boyfriend coming back from holiday with a dolphin growing inside his belly. Orlewicz-Zakrzewska said that “using the role reversal in the couple with regard to the pregnancy, I want to underline the fluidity of gender needs and show the variety of possible means to achieve the fulfillment of ‘giving birth.”
The two leads are already confirmed with Jasmina Polak from Fucking Bornholm to play the musician Anna and Bartosz Bielenia from Jan Komasa’s Oscar-nominated Corpus Christi cast as the boyfriend Jan.
The €1.6m project had been developed during this year’s edition of MIDPOINT Feature Launch and received the Connecting Cottbus Award and Rotterdam Lab Award at Karlovy Vary’s Eastern Promises showcase last July.
Meanwhile, the cocoPITCH jury of producers Alicja Grawon-Jaksik (MTL Maxfilm, Poland), Ales Pavlin (Perfo, Slovenia) and sales agent Francesca Tiberi (True Colours, Italy) gave this year’s Avanpost Pitch Packaging Award to the mystery drama/horror film Inheritance by the Ukrainian film critic and director Stanislav Bytiutskyi and his producers Valeria Sochyvets and Inna Lastochkina from Kyiv-based Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema.
As part of its award, the Romanian post-production outfit will provide the winning project with in-kind services of up to €15,000.
The Producers Network Award, with free accreditation to the Producers Network in Cannes next May, went to producers Petra Iványi of Hungary’s Lupa Pictures and Margarita Amineva-Jester of Berlin-based Voices Films for Borbála Nagy’s cocoPITCH project The Origin Of The World, while the MIDPOINT programme’s award of three in-depth script consultancies were presented to Minos Nikolakakis’ Asphalt (Greece), Nikon Romanchenko’s State (Ukraine), and Nermin Hamzagić’s Supermarket (Bosnia & Herzegovina).
The works in progress jury consisting of Lukas Moudry (Studio Beep, Czech Republic) Stefan Ivansic (Non Aligned Films, Serbia), Julia Peters (jip film & verleih, Germany) as well as German post-production house D-Facto Motion’s Waheed Zamani and Robert Wunsch gave the D-Facto Motion WIP Award of €35,000 in-kind services plus €5,000 for additional expenses went to Hungarian director Balázs Dudás’ Blazing which also picked up Prague-based Studio Beep’s new award for sound post-production offering € 6,000 worth of in-kind services.
coco success stories
coco director Marjorie Bendeck said that a record number of 10 films that had previously been presented at coco as a project or work in progress are screening in this year’s FilmFestival Cottbus programme.
They include the world premiere of Irma Pužauskaitė‘s The 9th Step and Orlin Milchev’s coming-of-age tale The Art Of Falling in the festival’s U18 Youth Film competition, while Polish director Anna Jadowska’s character study Woman On The Roof is vying with other coco alumni such as Beata Parkanová’s Karlovy Vary 2022 double award winner The Word and Paul Negoescu’s study of masculine toxicity in Men Of Deeds for top honours in Cottbus’ Feature Film Competition.
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