Tbilisi International Film Festival/3
The Pitch workshop has started. 10 projects have been selected from 5 countries: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbjadan, Ukraine and Moldova. A diversity of themes were presented by filmmakers with a different background. They met each other, heard about the state of the art in Europe and pitched and got feedback from colleagues. The organiser of the workshop, Anna Dziapshipa, who works at the Georgian Film Center, and who is also working as a producer, and the director Salome Jashi (her films have reviewed on this site) did a fine case study on their work-in-progress, Bahkmaro and Those Who Work There. This film-to-be was pitched at the Baltic Sea Forum in Riga September 2008, did a year of the Ex Oriente EU MEDIA training workhop in three stages – and was very succesfully received at public pitching sessions in Leipzig and Jihlava this autumn. The film project was originally in its early development phase supported by the Gothenburg Film Festival Fund, a very honourable move from the Swedish, who are here to pick one of the 10 film proposals at the workshop to give a grant of 5000€.
The workshop takes place at the Goethe Institute in Tbilisi, and I have again to express admiration for the generous attitude of the Germans in this part of the world, where support is granted to local filmmakers, very often also as a financial help for development and production of documentary films.
Friday the 5th a public pitching session will take place within the framework of the international film festival.
Photo: Anna Dziapshipa, Tue Steen Müller and German co-producer Heino Deckert in Jihlava.
