CinéDOC Mentoring & Pitch/1

This is a quote from a text posted here some months ago… when the mentoring program started. At the next post you will find the awarded projects at the pitching session of yesterday, a long and fine day with 66 people on zoom from the very beginning and only a few who had to leave at the end of the day – very pleased to moderate for four hours, an easy job as all is so well prepared by the Cinédoc Team and the pitchers were ready after training by Cecilia Lidin and Martijn de Pas. Chapeau to everyone attending and for the funders of an event of importance – the Swiss SDC and the Civil Society Centre in Prague. And first of all good luck to the filmmakers, there is sooo much talent.

And the quote: I have not talked to anyone, who prefers zoom to face-to-face meetings. On the other hand the zoom or teams or skype make it possible to see and talk to each other in these times of pandemic. And it works well as I experience right now being part of the Film Mentoring Program of the International Documentary Film Festival CinéDOC-Tbilisi. The cast are 15 young and younger filmmakers from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan – and 5 mentors: Gitte Hansen Schnyder, Audrius Stonys, Sergey Dvortsevoy, Phil Jandaly and me. Organised by Ileana Stanculescu and Artchil Khetagouri, and their excellent team, who I know from the festival and from summer schools, online and physical. It’s super-professional and with warmth and enthusiasm in the spirit of ”we want to help”. 

The set-up is new and exciting for me: Each mentor works with 3 filmmakers 3 x three hours with weeks in between, where the filmmakers write or film or think… So far I – and the other mentors – have had the first round of individual meetings plus two times group meetings  with 3 filmmakers, who are not the ones with whom you have face-to-face meetings…