TALLINN: Kadri Kõusaar’s second film The Arbiter, which had its international premiere in the East of the West competition at the Karlovy Vary IFF, is a morally challenging and difficult film that launched a funding debate in Estonia.
COTTBUS: Perisan Film of Turkey is producing Detail of a Dream written and directed by Orhan Eskikoy.
COTTBUS: Slovenian director Jan Cvitkovic returns to form with a bittersweet slacker comedy, Siska de Luxe produced by Alex Pavlin of Perfo.
COTTBUS: A Kurdish construction worker in Istanbul fakes an accident resulting in his death in order to help his family obtain “blood money” from the company to secure a home for his displaced family in the project Blood Money presented at the 15th edition of the pitching forum Connecting Cottbus.
COTTBUS: A Serbian film project, The Load, a gripping story of a truck driver who learns that the cargo he’s been transporting from Kosova to Belgrade contains the bodies of victims of the war in Yugoslavia, won the Post-Pitch Award of 25,000 in in-kind services at the 15th Connecting Cottbus pitching forum.
COTTBUS: Russia writer/director Alena Alova pitched the tale of a young Russian émigré who falls in love with an Italian girl and ruins his family’s chance to immigrate, City of Birds, at the 15th edition of Connecting Cottbus.
COTTBUS: The winner of the 2012 Cottbus Film Festival, Zebra Film Studio of Poland, was back at Cottbus in the winner’s pitch slot of Connecting Cottbus with the project Silence of the Scream directed by Maria Sadowska.
COTTBUS: Romanian husband-and-wife directing/producing team Andrei Cretulescu and Codruta Cretulescu presented their love-triangle-with-a-twist project Seventeen Seconds at the 15th edition of Connecting Cottbus.
TALLINN: The EurAsia main competition of the 17th Black Nights Film Festival running 15 November – 1 December 2013 encompasses European Cannes competitors and debuting Asian directors when the main festival and its satellite programmes take over the northern Baltic capital.
COTTBUS: Marriage, the winner of the best pitch award at Connecting Cottbus is a love triangle that touches on a taboo topic in Kosovo: homosexuality.
