TorinoFilmLab (TFL) has selected three international co-productions as winners of its 2024 Audience Design Fund, which provides financial aid and coaching for films at the distribution stage.
The three awarded projects are Indian director Kapadia Payal’s All We Imagine As Light; Egyptian directors Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir’s The Brink Of Dreams; and US-based Nepalese director Deepak Rauniyar’s The Sky Is Mine.
Each film is currently in post-production and will receive a €45,000 grant plus three online consultancy sessions to advise on innovative audience engagement and outreach strategies.
All We Imagine As Light is the second film from Kapadia Payal, whose documentary called A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered at Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight in 2021. The fiction feature is about two nurses in Mumbai, each stuck in impossible love situations, who go on a road trip where a mystical forest becomes a space for their dreams to manifest. The film is produced by France’s Petit Chaos, the beneficiary of the fund, and co-produced by Chalk and Cheese (India), Baldr Film (The Netherlands) and Les Films Fauves Sarl (Luxemburg).
Documentary The Brink Of Dreams is the second film from Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir, who worked together on Happily Ever After which premiered at IDFA in 2016, and on the short film Fakh (The Trap), which was selected for Cannes Critics’ Week in 2019. Set in a conservative village in southern Egypt, The Brink Of Dreams centres on a group of Coptic girls who form an all-female street theatre troupe, challenging traditions while fleeting between childhood and womanhood. The film is produced by Egypt’s Felucca Films and co-produced by Magma Films (Denmark) and Dolce Vita Films (France), the beneficiary of the fund.
The Sky Is Mine is the third feature by Deepak Rauniyar whose debut Highway premiered at the 2012 Berlinale. His second film White Sun premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival. Set in the midst of escalating race riots in Nepal, it sees a female detective in a race against time to solve a high-profile kidnapping case of two young boys. Solving it could restore peace, but failure would fan the flames into a full-blown revolution. The film is produced by Neplal’s Aadi Films, co-produced by Baasuri Films (Nepal) and Tannhauser Gate (Norway), the beneficiary of the fund.
The consultancies for the films will offered by the CEO of Germany’s Pluto Film Benjamin Cölle; the coordinator of the Berlinale-World Cinema Fund Isona Admetlla; the director of The Audience Design Lab for the International Screen Institute Síle Culley; the owner of Spain’s Stendhal Films Silvia Lobo; German screenwriter and script consultant Kirsten Loose; and the assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen Petar Mitric. Three experts also join the team: the head of acquisition at sales agency Films Boutique Gabor Greiner; digital marketing agency Alphapanda head strategist Mathias Noschis; and two representatives from The PR Factory.
2024 marks the 10th year for the TFL Audience Design Fund, which is backed by Creative Europe’s Media programme. Last year, the Fund supported Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s Venice Horizons’ premiere City Of Wind; Jianjie Lin’s Sundance premiere Brief History Of A Family; and Kamay by Ilyas Yourish with Shahrokh Bikaraan as contributing director, which premieres at this month’s Visions du Réel.
TFL Audience Design Fund head of studies Valeria Richter said: “The selection for the three TFL Audience Design Fund Awards of 2024 resulted in two fiction films, from respectively India and Nepal, and an Egyptian feature documentary. We received the largest number of applications ever and this strong selection of films turns out to have a common thread, each bringing aspects of women’s rights and structural racism to the forefront.”
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