"Speedway" withdrawn from the Main Competition of the 44th Polish Film Festival

We will not see "Speedway" directed by Dorota Kędzierzawska in Gdynia during the 44th Polish Film Festival.

"Speedway" was withdrawn from the Main Competition at the request of the producer, Artur Reinhart, because the post-production works on the film will not be finished until the Festival.

Nineteen films will compete for Golden and Silvers Lions, as well as other statutory and extra statutory prizes, in the Main Competition of the 44th Polish Film Festival:

"Corpus Christi", directed by Jan Komasa;
"Dark, Almost Night", directed by Borys Lankosz;
"The Black Mercedes", directed by Janusz Majewski;
"The Valley of Gods", directed by Lech Majewski;
"Icarus. The Legend of Mietek Kosz", directed by Maciej Pieprzyca;
"Interior", directed by Marek Lechki;
"The Messenger", directed by Władysław Pasikowski;
"The Legions", directed by Dariusz Gajewski;
"Bird Talk", directed by Xavery Żuławski;
"Mr. Jones", directed by Agnieszka Holland;
"Mister T.", directed by Marcin Krzyształowicz;
"Pilsudski", directed by Michał Rosa;
"Proceder", directed by Michał Węgrzyn;
"Dolce Fine Giornata", directed by Jacek Borcuch;
"Solid Gold", directed by Jacek Bromski;
"Supernova", directed by Bartosz Kruhlik;
"The Coldest Game", directed by Łukasz Kośmicki;
"All For My Mother", directed by Małgorzata Imielska;
"The Iron bridge", directed by Monika Jordan-Młodzianowska.

The 44th Polish Film Festival in Gdynia will be held on September 16-21, 2019 in Gdynia.

connecting cottbus 6-8 november 2019:
OPEN CALL FOR PROJECTS & AWARDS

East-West co-production market connecting cottbus, held during FilmFestival Cottbus in November 2019, is currently open for submissions. We present 13 projects in development and 6 works in progress, all competing for a number of awards.

Our cocoPITCH section is dedicated to projects in development. The coco Best Pitch Award is voted for by our industry audience and includes a cash prize towards development as well as a free accreditation to the Cannes Producers Network.

Courtesy of our partners MIDPOINT, the renowned training platform for script and project development, comes the MIDPOINT Consulting Award, consisting of in-depth script consultancy with MIDPOINT experts for three of our selected projects.

We are also happy to welcome back our partner AVANPOST and their new film production brand AVANGUARD. The production arm of the renowned Romanian post-production facility Avanpost will offer the AVANGUARD Pitch Packaging Award, including financing strategy consulting, the project lookbook as well as the post-production for a proof of concept.

For our cocoWIP section presenting works in progress, we are once again teaming up with major German post-production studio D-FACTO MOTION, who will sponsor the D-Facto Motion WIP Award of €35,000 in-kind services plus €5,000 granted for additional expenses.

Producers can submit their feature fiction film projects in development for cocoPITCH until 17 July 2019, and projects in production or post-production for cocoWIP until 22 August 2019. The project must be connected to Eastern Europe in subject or production context.

Producers, sales agents, commissioning editors and other industry representatives active in East-West European co-production can apply without a project by 7 October 2019. 

This year’s edition of connecting cottbus takes place on 6-8 November 2019.

We look forward to receiving your projects!

Your coco team

JOIN COCO 2019

BREAKING NEWS

Czech films to compete at 76th Venice Film Festival

Long-awaited Czech-Ukrainian-Slovak feature The Painted Bird was selected for the main competition of the prestigious Venice Film Festival. The director of the project Václav Marhoul (Tobruk, 2008) based his film on the eponymous novel by Jerzy Koziński and created a meticulous 35mm black and white evocation of wild, primitive Eastern Europe at the bloody close of World War II. In addition, short animated Sh_t Happens will compete in Orizzonti.

The Painted Bird starring Petr Kotlár, Harvey Keitel or Stellan Skarsgaard is the first majority Czech representative in the main competition of Venice Film Festival in 25 years. Marhoul's feature is produced by Silver Screen (CZ) and co-produced by Directory Films (UA), PubRes (SK), Czech Television (CZ), Jaroslav Kučera (CZ), Innogy (CZ) and Richard Kaucký (CZ). The project was supported by the Czech Film Fund in both development and production stages (with EUR 992,308) and also in the film incentives programme.

The film follows the journey of The Boy, entrusted by his persecuted parents to an elderly foster mother. The old woman soon dies an the Boy is on his own, wandering through the country-side, from village to farmhouse. As he struggles for survival, The Boy suffers through extraordinary brutality metod out by the ignorant, superstitious peasants and he witnesses the terrifying violence of the efficient, ruthless soldiers, both Russian and German.

Czech Cinema has another representative in the official programme of this year's Venice Film Festival - an animated short Sh_t Happens which will compete in Orizzonti section. The Thirteen minutes long film, directed by Michaela Mihályi and David Štumpf, produced by BFILM.cz and co-produced by Bagan Films (FR), BFILM (SK) and FAMU (CZ), was supported by the Czech Film Fund with EUR 21,923.

An apartment building full of self centered inhabitants. Utterly exhausted caretaker and his sexually frustrated wife. Widowed deer drowning his sorrows in loads of alcohol... While trying to cope with their problems, they find themselfs in a hard to solve triangle asking for absurd and irrational solutions. The consequnces can easily become permanent, sometimes maybe too permanent. The film is a loose adaptation of a well-known biblical story while transforming in into a contemporary ironic narrative about how the world sometimes works.

Czech Film Center operates as a division of the Czech Film Fund.

BRUSSELS, 25 JULY 2019: The International Union of Cinemas (UNIC), representing cinema associations - including the Associazione Nazionale Esercenti Cinema (ANEC) and the Associazione Nazionale Esercenti Multiplex (ANEM) - and key operators across 38 territories in Europe, calls for films selected in competition at leading film festivals and awards to receive a full theatrical release. 

Following the decision from the Venice International Film Festival to include the films The Laundromat and Marriage Story in its 2019 official selection, the association released the following statement: 

Thanks to their global prestige, leading film festivals and awards competitions have both the honour and the responsibility of bringing high quality and diverse films to the attention of audiences around the world. 

For that reason, cinema operators expect both to consider only those titles intended to receive a full theatrical release and - where release strategies for films selected for inclusion are not yet confirmed - to make every effort to encourage the distributors of these titles to observe established industry norms. 

The inclusion of films in official selections that are within the reach of everyone - and not only that of streaming platform subscribers - benefits the audience as a whole. Where films are available solely on these platforms, or receive only a limited "technical" release in cinemas, festival/award selection becomes in truth only a marketing tool whereby most of the potential audience is denied access to a wealth of great content. 

Cinemas offer their audiences an unparalleled cultural and social experience, which through state of the art technologies allow each film truly to do justice to the creative vision of its director. Not only do they represent the gold standard for film viewing, but in general theatrical releases also provide the opportunity for the widest possible audience to discover and enjoy as broad a range of film content as possible, employing a fair and transparent business model of longstanding and proven benefit to audiences as well as to the wider film and cinema sector. 

In short, cinema operators - who are themselves long-standing and strong partners and supporters of film festivals and awards competitions - strongly believe that those organising such events around the World should celebrate and support the social, cultural and economic relevance of cinemas, taking responsibility for the diversity and accessibility of the films they include.