Honorary Heart of Sarajevo to Mark Cousins

In recognition of his outstanding contribution to the art of film, director and writer Mark Cousins will receive the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival. 

This will not be his first encounter with the city – his first visit to Sarajevo was during the Siege, in the mid 90s. He and the Edinburgh International Film Festival had visited the Obala Art Centar cinema, where they showed films in support of Sarajevo’s besieged citizens. That cinema will come to be the birthplace of the Sarajevo Film Festival. 

„Taking films from the Edinburgh International Film Festival to Sarajevo during its siege showed me why movies matter. Most things I’ve done since have been influenced by those scary, inspiring weeks in 1994. Going back to Sarajevo for the first time, after 29 years, will open a dam of emotions for me. The Honorary Heart of Sarajevo will take pride of place in my home and remind me of the need to take risks, to act in solidarity. I can still learn from the young man I was and, far more so, from the pioneering people in Sarajevo who understood that movies aren’t just a pastime. They are a crucial part of our lives. I’m so grateful“, said Mark Cousins.

Mark Cousins is a Scottish-Irish filmmaker. His themes are the inspiring power  

of cinema, cities, walking, childhood, archives and recovery. At the start of his career he made TV documentaries on childhood, neo-Nazism and Mikhael Gorbachev. The first book he penned was Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary (which the Times Literary Supplement dubbed “indispensable”). Cousins’ first feature documentary, THE FIRST MOVIE (2009), about kids in Iraqi Kurdistan, won the Prix Italia. It was inspired by growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and his passionate interest in the role cinema can play in children’s lives.

The London Times called his subsequent book, The Story of Film, “by some distance the best book we have read on cinema.” His 930 minute film, THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY (2011), was screened at some of the most prominent international film festivals, and in cinemas worldwide. In addition to Michael Moore giving it the Stanley Kubrick Award, it was BAFTA Scotland nominated, and won the Peabody Award among many other prizes. A decade later he would come to direct its sequel, THE STORY OF FILM: A NEW GENERATION (2021).

WHAT IS THIS FILM CALLED LOVE? (2012) was released in 20 countries, presented at the ICA in London, and nominated for Best Director by BAFTA Scotland. PJ Harvey called it “revelatory and inspiring”. The rock band Maximo Park wrote a song inspired by it.

In 2013 he completed HERE BE DRAGONS, a film about the vital role of film archives, especially in Albania. It won the Grand Prix at the Romania Film Festival. In the same year he made A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM, which was in the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

His next film, LIFE MAY BE, co-directed with Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari, was lauded for its feminist and innovative approach, and called “transcendent and extraordinarily delicate”. It won the Don Quixote prize. 6 DESIRES: DH LAWRENCE AND SARDINIA, an adaptation of DH Lawrence’s book Sea and Sardinia, premiered at the London Film Festival and Sundance.

Cousins’ THE OAR AND THE WINNOWING FAN was a takeover of the DazedDigital website, whilst I AM BELFAST was his first full feature about Northern Ireland. His BBC/BFI film ATOMIC, a collaboration with the band Mogwai, screened in both Hiroshima and the Chernobyl perimeter, as well as at the Coventry Cathedral and the Edinburgh International Festival.

In 2016, he made the feature film STOCKHOLM MY LOVE. In 2017, he completed BIGGER THAN THE SHINING, a secret project, which he chose to only present in underground circumstances. That same year, Mark Cousin’s The Story of Looking was published. It was nominated for the Saltire Award for best non-fiction book.

Cousins’ THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES had its World Premiere in Cannes in 2018. 2018 also saw him complete the 2-hour, four-screen STORM IN MY HEART, which was commissioned by the Rotterdam Film Festival. The installation addressed sexism and racism in Hollywood. His 2018, 14-hour film WOMEN MAKE FILM is narrated by Jane Fonda, Sharmila Tagore, Debra Winger, Adjoa Andoh, Kerry Fox and Tilda Swinton, and has gained vast exposure and recognition across the screens all over the world. It won the European Film Academy’s inaugural Innovative Storytelling award, and has led to the restoration of a series of films directed by women.

Two more recent films are THE STORMS OF JEREMY THOMAS, about the legendary film producer – which premiered in Cannes 2021 and won the best documentary in Spain’s Dias De Cine – and THE STORY OF LOOKING, in which he filters the history of looking through his own eye surgery. It won the Best Non-Fiction Film award at the Seville Film Festival. Cousins recently completed MY NAME IS ALFRED HITCHCOCK and THE MARCH ON ROME (both 2022). The latter premiered at the Venice film festival, won the audience award for Best International Documentary in Brazil, and was nominated for a European Film Academy Award.

In 2022, his films were the subject of a multi-screen film installation, Passé Présent Futur, at the huge Plaza cinema in Geneva, and had a retrospective at the Biograf film festival in Bologna. He premiered his first art installation, LIKE A HUGE SCOTLAND, at the Fruitmarket gallery, Edinburgh.

Alongside his prolific career as an author and filmmaker, Mark Cousins has gained honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling, is an Honorary Professor of Film at Queen’s University Belfast, and has notable achievements in film programming and curating. He was Chair of the Belfast Film Festival and Docs Ireland. He curated CINEMA OF CHILDHOOD, a series of 17 films which toured the UK and Ireland for a year. He was co-artistic director of Cinema China. Together with Tilda Swinton, he also created cinema events such as The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams and A Pilgrimage. He and Swinton additionally ran The 8 ½ Foundation: a two-year event which created movie birthdays for children. It was nominated for the Human Rights Award.

He was recently given Portugal’s Aurelio de Paz dos Reis international award for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema, and the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Outstanding Achievement Award for his work in screen education (2020). In 2023 he received the Persistence of Vision Award from the San Francisco Film Festival, the annual Maverick award at the Dublin International Film Festival and the Outstanding Contribution to Film and Culture Award from the Ismailia Film Festival in Egypt.

The 29th Sarajevo Film Festival will take place from the 11th to the 18th of August, 2023.

In the context of Mark Cousins’ Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award, the festival will also hold a special screening of MARCH ON ROME as part of its Dealing with the Past section.

photo: mark cousins (jenny leask)

Mansky & Titarenko: Eastern Front

This film has been shown at numerous festivals and now the audience In Barcelona gets the chance to watch it and meet one of its directors, Vitaly Mansky, in the Q&A. At a session the day before, entitled “Documentary filmmaking against the backdrop of war”, Mansky will be on stage together with Alba Sotorra Clua , Barcelona based director, who has made fims like the documentary feature film Game Over (2015), which received the VIII Gaudí Award from the Catalan Film Academy and Comandante Arian (2018), nominated for the Gaudí Awards for Best Documentary in 2019.

I have seen “Eastern Front” and it is a strong documentary from the frontline at the same time as you get some impressive and positive insights to what a group of volunteer medics perform to help injured soldiers get to hospital before it is too late – often it is. Yehen Titarenko, charismatic co-director with Mansky, filmmaker, is on the screen driving the car through muddy roads OR he is with his medic friends in quiet Western Ukraine, where they go to relax and celebrate a baptism, and talk talk talk about what this war has meant  and means to them. A quote from the description of Titarenko on the website of DocsBarcelona: 

“On 24 February 2022, Yeyhen and his friends decide to volunteer to join the first aid battalion on the eastern front of the Ukrainian war. They are willing to provide all necessary support and evacuate the wounded. For six months, the hand-held camera follows them with showing the rawness, fear, hatred and bitterness of war with shocking proximity and without intermediaries…”

“Eastern Front” will be shown in Barcelona the 25th of May, the day before Mansky and Alba Sotorra will have the mentioned dialogue, moderated by Marc Marginedas, about documentary filmmaking in the midst of armed conflicts:

What are the challenges when filming a war or bringing real stories to the big screen against the backdrop of an armed conflict? What role does the documentary gaze play as a political positioning and what is the implication behind directing documentaries while highlighting the more human side of war? How does the filmmaker find hope in the midst of war? What filmmaking decisions do they make to show the rawness and violence, but at the same time, hope? How does one write the script/editing of a war film from a perspective, where hope prevails? When does the filmmaker realise they are in front of a great sequence in the midst of the conflict?

6 pens

Silver Crane Award Nominations

The Lithuanian national film awards, the Silver Cranes, will be announced on June 4. The nominations have been announced. Yesterday English version via FilmNewEurope. I took a look at the list of nominated documentaries, that includes the following:

Antanas Sutkus. Scenes from Photographer’s Life / Antanas Sutkus. Scenos Iš Fotografo Gyvenimo (Lithuania)
Directed by Vytautas V. Landsbergis
Produced by Studija APropos

Decadent Nr. 2419 / Dekadentas NR. 2419 (Lithuania)
Directed by Saimir Bajo
Produced by Ketvirtaversija

Burial / Kapinynas (Lithuania, Norway)
Directed by Emilija Škarnulytė
Produced by Just a moment
Coproduced by Mer Film

Mariupolis 2 (Lithuania, France, Germany)
Directed by Mantas Kvedaravičius, co-directed by Hanna Bilobrova
Produced by Studio Uljana Kim, Extimacy film
Coproduced by Easy Riders films, Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion

Back from New York / Sugrįę iš Niujorko (Lithuania)
Directed by Ramunė Rakauskaité

I have seen the two last ones on the list – for the Danes: “Mariupolis 2” will be shown at Cinemateket tomorrow, whereas “Back from New York”, produced by Studio Nominum, is a wonderful one hour homage to Life and Art. Here is the description of the film from the website of the production company: “Back from New York” is a film about two unique and appreciated artists, close friends, whose lives were greatly influenced by emigration. It is not only a story about the discoveries of these wanderers, but also about the true joys of life, coming back and creating a new life in their homeland. By choice, they decided to return to Lithuania after many years spent in the rattling and enchanting New York. Photo-artist Arūnas Kulikauskas has settled in a monocot in Ukmergė district, painter Eugenijus Varkulevičius-Varkalis – in his hometown Kaunas… The film has great material with Jonas Mekas, whose influence on the two is strongly in focus. 

Ramunė Rakauskaité is also nominated in the Best Director category and also the editor Audinga Kučinskaitė is appreciated for a work that perfectly has found the rythm to answer the bohemian life in New York and at home. 

Mantas Kvedaravicius Mariupolis 2

Mantas Kvedaravicius

In 2011 I attended a Summer School in Neringa Lithuania for film students. A film by Mantas Kvedaravicius was shown, his first.

”Stasys Baltakis, teacher at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, the film school of the Country, introduced the film and its director. ”He is not a film director, he is a thinker”, he said about the debutant Kvedaravicius, who made the film over a period of years, now completing his PhD (and a book) on the affects of pain. And the film is about pain, about people in Chechnya, families whose members disappear or have undergone torture. Shot illegally, and with one year in the editing, the film expresses pure love and respect for the characters without turning to sentimentalism…

The camera catches magical moments inside the houses, the characters tell their stories of pain and torture, mainly off the picture, car trips give the narrative a flow and information about how a devastated city looks, at the same time as the Russian authorities have done a lot to lighten up mosques and other buildings. Pure facade for the invisible violence, it seems. While watching the film you sense a growing anger and sadness witnessing the life of people, who wait and hope…” (from the review of Barzach, 2011)

”Kvedaravicius, whose last film (his first) ”Barzakh”, a masterpiece, took place in Chechnya, has again created a tense work of a beauty that lies in the aesthetic choices he has made with the camera, that he and two others have operated. You enjoy frame by frame, scene after scene, sequence after sequence the way he has placed the camera and the naturalness with which the editing takes you around.

How shall I leave this praise of a film that develops and towards the end brings images of exploded cars and destroyed buildings, and has scenes where the population is taught how to put out fire… I want to and will remember the shoemaker repairing shoes and having conversations with clients and family. A location that comes back, with peace, a statement of survival of humanism, as this great director has delivered with what is only his second film…” (from the review of Mariupolis, 2016)

And now Mariupolis 2, shot by Kvedaravicius, shown at festivals and awarded as the best European documentary at the EFA ceremony in Reykjavik in December. The film was before that shown at IDFA where it was introduced like this: “In 2022, Mantas Kvedaravičius returned to the ruined city of Mariupol in Ukraine to film the people he met for his 2016 documentary Mariupolis. There, he was killed in early April by Russian troops while documenting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. His fiancée managed to escape with the footage. After his death, producers and crew gave their all to edit his final, unfinished film and show it to the world.”

Watching the film I can only echo what was written about the two previous films. Mantas Kvedaravicius shows his respectful approach to human beings in need, he stays with them, no sensationalism, he follows them when they clean the ground after the Russian bombings, when they gather to eat in the cellar, where they pray and sleep, when they prepare a soup outside, where two men transport a generator at a place, where two corpses lie on the ground, accompanied by the sounds of bombings around all the time, “let’s go to the mass grave” someone says referring to the airstrike in March of the Theatre of Mariupol, where civilians had found shelter.

The great director Mantas Kvedaravicius created with this film what one of the legends in documentary history called “the sense of being there”, with love and respect. RIP

Stonys & Briede: Bridges of Time

This is a text I wrote for the premiere of the film, 30th of June 2018:

Wow, it’s tomorrow at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival that Bridges of Time has its premiere. The film, a co-production between the three Baltic countries, is introduced like this by the festival: “Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys’s meditative documentary essay portrays the less-remembered generation of cinema poets of the Baltic New Wave. With finesse, they push beyond the barriers of the common historiographic investigation in order to achieve a consummate poetic treatment of the ontology of documentary creation.”

A fine intro, however, I would make it a bit longer with these words: “This is a film for all cinema lovers. It tells about the Baltic poetic documentary cinema that was created during the Soviet Union. In opposition to the USSR propaganda films. It was a wave of a personal free visual language that celebrated life and humanity. Together with Latvian Kristine Briede, Lithuanian director Audrius Stonys, who in his own work continues the tradition for a poetic look at reality, has picked magical moments from unique long and short documentaries to let them meet the old masters as they look today or when they were in front of the camera decades ago. The directors in the film about this special artistic phenomenon in film history are Herz Frank, Uldis Brauns, Ivars Seleckis, Andres Sööt, Robertas Verba, Henrikas Sablevicius, Arvis Freimanis, Mark Soosaar.”

I have been invited to come for the premiere in Karlovy Vary, which I do with great pleasure as someone whose professional life changed completely in the 1990’es, where I discovered the Baltic documentary on the island of Bornholm where a festival, Balticum Film & TV Festival took place until 2000. Today it is my joy to go to Riga every year to take part in the Baltic Sea Docs that is a continuation of the adventure on Bornholm, as is the collaboration of the three Baltic countries cinema-wise with this celebration os something very special – the film will be followed by a superb retrospective of the primarily short documentaries made by the masters in the documentary. 

Arunas Matelis: Wonderful Losers

This is a text that I wrote in October 2017 when Arunas Matelis film had its world premiere:

… with the subtitle ”A Different World”, a film that many of us, who think Lithuanian Arunas Matelis is a great artistic documentary film director, have been waiting for – will have its premiere at the Warsaw International Film Festival that takes place October 13-22, a festival for fiction, shorts and documentaries. Arunas and his wife Alge, from their Studio Nominum in Vilnius, have produced a film of high quality (I have seen it just before final cut) that deserves to travel the world because of its cinematic qualities and its invitation to us viewers to look into – as the subtitle says- a different world. It’s (also) a film on professional cycling that touches upon existential questions. Here is the synopsis from the site of the film, link below:

”For spectators, cyclists in the back of the race are simply the losers. They are called water carriers, domestics, gregarios, and Sancho Panzas of professional cycling. Moreover, they have no right to personal victories – these sportsmen sacrifice their careers to help their teammates. We follow the magnificent world of the race from the point of view of the doctors’ team situated in a claustrophobically small medical car surrounded with wounded cyclists. The life of the medical team in race reminds one on the frontline of war. Cyclists crash, rise and race again. And amongst this fight, many magnificent things happen. This film-odyssey reveals the untold world of the wonderful losers, true warriors, knights and monks of professional cycling.”

From a production point of view the credits show an amazing list of co-producers (with 10 cinematographers!) – let me mention them from the credits: Stefilm Italy, Dok Mobile Switzerland, Associate Directors Belgium, VFS Films Latvia, Dearcan Media N.Ireland/UK, Planet Korda Ireland, SUICA Films Spain, Arturas Jevdokimovas for Kino Kontora.

Normally you say that too many cooks spoil the meal – having known Arunas Matelis and his work for more than 25 years I can assure you that this is a film that has his signature.

Wish you good luck with the premiere!

http://www.wonderfullosers.com

DocuDays UA Civil Pitch at Hot Docs

Copy paste from the FB page of DocuDays:

“We received 150 applications for the Civil Pitch 2.0 programme. The jury selected 4 projects that received not only grants for film production, but also mentoring support at all stages of their work. Please welcome the world premiere of the winning films at the 30th anniversary Hot Docs Film Festival in Canada!

All four short documentary projects tell stories about war and people from a unique perspective. “..Pavlo Dorohoi’s 89 Days takes us into a Kharkiv subway-station-turned-bomb-shelter-turned-back-into-a-subway-station; in Under the Wing of a Night, director Lesia Diak immerses herself in 11-year-old Olesia’s new life in Belgium as she waits for her father’s nightly call from back home; Halyna Lavrynets’s Guests from Kharkiv watches activist Nelia try to resettle city-dwellers into rural Ukrainian life; and Anastasiia Tykha’s Our Robo Family celebrates the children’s robotics and programming group Roboclub Vuhledar. Enjoy the freshest Ukrainian documentary talent of 2023!” comments Myrocia Watamaniuk, the Hot Docs Film Festival programmer.

Find the screening schedule, tickets, and other necessary details here. And in June, expect the Ukrainian premiere of the films at the anniversary Docudays UA.

“Civil Pitch 2.0 started at the end of 2021. We actively planned the workshops, took care of the applications, and were in constant contact with foreign tutors. A few days before the full-scale invasion, we were still planning the workshop programme and even hoped to bring our tutors to Kyiv. The very existence of us, of this workshop, and ultimately of this four films, seems like a miracle now, given everything that has happened and is happening. I am grateful to everyone who has supported us along the way: the programme team, tutors, donors, and, of course, the filmmakers and their crews who have worked hard on their projects. 

When we resumed our activities under Civil Pitch 2.0 after the start of the full-scale invasion, we changed the project’s slogan to “Cinema that brings victory closer.” That was more than six months ago. Today, I don’t know if cinema can really bring victory closer, but I do know that cinema can help us survive the most difficult events and make sense of them. I hope that Civil Pitch 2.0 films will allow both foreign and Ukrainian audiences to understand what is happening to us,” adds Darya Bassel, the director of the DOCU/PRO Industry Platform.

CPH:DOX 2023 Scores Biggest Audience Ever

The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX became a record breaking year for Denmark’s largest film festival. During the festival, the audience number reached 125,680 – in total. Audiences flocked to the cinemas – both in Copenhagen and in the 28 municipalities that were part of the festival this year.

With an audience of 125,680, CPH:DOX 2023 became the most visited edition of the festival ever. Over the past 20 years, CPH:DOX has grown from a small Copenhagen event with just under 12,000 visiting guests to one of the world’s leading documentary film festivals with a large and engaged audience, both in the cinemas and online on the festival’s new streaming platform PARA:DOX.

Niklas Engstrøm, Artistic Director of CPH:DOX, said:
“With this year’s edition of CPH:DOX, we have finally stepped out of the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic which has left its mark on the festival and its ability to reach a live audience every year since 2020. The 20th anniversary of CPH:DOX was really a celebration – of documentary cinema and of the film festival as a social event. The most wonderful thing is that the massive interest by our local crowd goes hand in hand with rising international attention, and I’m happy to see how so many of the films premiering at CPH:DOX are now continuing their journey in the international festival circuit and market”.

The most popular film in the cinemas during CPH:DOX 2023 was ‘A Storm Foretold’, Christoffer Guldbrandsen’s long-awaited film about Donald Trump’s former adviser Roger Stone, while ‘After Work’ by Erik Gandini became the most streamed film at the festival’s online platform, PARA:DOX. Both films were screened in the festival’s world premieres-only main competition DOX:AWARD.

International attention on the raise
CPH:DOX 2023 not only offered a strong film program with +100 world premieres. The festival also offered a wide range of activities for professionals, including the ever more popular pitching forum for the international film industry, which moved to a bigger venue to accommodate the demand. This part of the festival has made headlines and received praise in a large number of leading international media, including Variety, Screen International and Deadline among others.

Katrine Kiilgaard, Managing Director of CPH:DOX, said:
“Since 2017, CPH:DOX has worked purposefully to develop the industry activities, and we are very happy to see that it is really bearing fruit. We have presented more projects, welcomed more professionals, conducted more individual meetings and given out more awards than ever before. But more importantly, CPH:DOX has attracted a critical mass of the most important players in the industry to meet the most talented filmmakers, making Copenhagen a hub for the further development of the documentary genre and a place not to be missed by the industry”.

Facts about audience interest in CPH:DOX
Overall, the film program at CPH:DOX 2023 was seen by an audience of 125,682.
The first edition of CPH:DOX in 2003 attracted a total of 11,706 visitors to the cinemas, but since then interest has been steadily increasing to 51,800 in 2012 up to the previous audience record of 117.720 in 2020. During the corona pandemic in 2020, CPH:DOX was quickly transformed into a digital festival – in a time of crisis when large parts of Denmark were shut down. In 2021 and 2022, CPH:DOX continued as a hybrid festival with film screening in cinemas and online as well.

6 pens.

Anna Dziapsh-ipa: Self-Portrait Along the Borderl

I’am in that weird situation that I have not seen the final version of a film that has its premiere tomorrow in Nyon in Switzerland in the presence of the director, a dear friend of me – and my wife – Anna, who we met the first time in Tbilisi way back in 2009 and since then have kept contact with. She presents herself as a filmmaker and visual artist, indeed she is, and she has done so much for Georgian documentary through the company Sakdoc that she runs together with Salomé Jashi. BUT back to her film that I will write more about when I have seen the final version. Here is the intro from the festival’s website:

“Anna Dziapsh-ipa was born of the union between an Abkhazian man and a Georgian woman. In Self-Portrait Along the Borderline, she skilfully weaves together unique archives and fragments to offer a personal and political biography of Georgia-Abkhazia relations. This vibrant exploration foregrounds a divided identity caught between the margins…”

After no success with festivals like IDFA and DOKLeipzig this fine autobiographical documentary essay finds its premiere at Visions du Réel in Nyon in Switzerland, where it will be shown tomorrow monday April 24, world premiere, and the director will be present.

I saw a rough cut long time ago and wrote to Anna: “Love it. It has humour, it has sadness, it is original in shape and has magic images taken by you, plus all the archive including those of yourself, I especially love the one where you look at the camera for a long time and then comes the smile…The spider methaphor, yes, I think it works, happy to have your grandfather so present, the man with the surname you carry (he was a famous football player!)… and your wedding, wow that was big, you use it perfectly… 

If you are not in Nyon to watch the film, click below and watch the trailer, that is wonderful:

https://www.visionsdureel.ch/film/2023/self-portrait-along-the-borderline/ 

Circle Women Doc Accelerator to Cannes

Copy paste from (part of) article of today’s Cineuropa, written by Vladan Petkovic: 

CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, an exclusive training programme for female-identifying documentary filmmakers, has selected the four projects that will take part in its showcase as part of the Cannes Docs programme of the Marché du Film(16-24 May) for the fourth consecutive year. Previous winners include Lin Alluna‘s Twice Colonized [+], Ágnes Horváth-Szabó and Anna Nemet’s Beauty of the Beast, and Maja Prelog‘s Cent’anni….

Ever Since I Knew Myself by Maka Gogaladze follows Maka, the daughter of a strict Maths teacher and high-maintenance mother, on her journey around post-Soviet Georgia to observe children in the process of education. Gogaladze is producing through Georgia’s Formo Production, with Anke Petersen and Lilian Tietjen serving as co-producers for Germany’s Jyoti Film.

Rebeladas by Andrea Gautier and Tabatta Salinas centres on the “Cine Mujer”, a group of women filmmakers who gathered 40 years ago to make films dealing with taboo subjects, such as gender violence, rape, femicide, clandestine abortion and labour discrimination. It is a co-production between Dafne Espinosa and Julio Fernández for Perro Rojo Films (Mexico), and Manuel Diaz, Juan Gautier and Andrea Gautier for Smiz and Pixel (Spain).

In 72 Hours by Anna Savchenko, a woman’s life has been incomplete ever since her son was wrongfully accused, sentenced to death and executed within a year. From a grieving mother, she transforms into a symbol of the struggle against the death penalty. It is being produced by Isabel de la Serna for Playtime Films in Belgium and Jean-Marie Gigon for Sanosi Films in France, in co-production with Volia Chajkouskaya for Volia Films (Estonia).

Tata, written and directed by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasă – My Home [+]), tells the story of a journalist who discovers that her long-estranged father, who was violent to her as a child, is now the person being abused. Tata is being produced by Monica Lazurean Gorgan for Manifest Film (Romania), Erik Winker for Corso Film (Germany) and Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen for HALAL (Netherlands).

Photo:  Vladan Petkovic