BREAKING NEWS

Student Academy Award goes to Czech short Daughter

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced this year's winners of the Student Academy Awards. The student Oscar for the best animated film from international schools goes to Czech short Daughter. Daria Kashcheeva, a student of FAMU, will become the third ever Czech director to be awarded with the student Oscar, which she will receive on 17 October, 2019 in Los Angeles.

Fifteen minutes long Daughter succeeded in the animation category for international film schools and will be awarded the Student Oscar 2019. Daria Kashcheeva will become the third Czech director honored with this prize, after Jan Svěrák (Oil Gobblers, 1989) and Marie Dvořáková (Who’s Who in Mycology, 2017). Several Czech and Czechoslovak authors were nominated for the student Oscar in the past: Miloš Zábranský (Horečka všedního dne, 1982), Aurel Klimt (Bloodthirsty Hugo, 1997), Václav Švankmajer (Test, 2000) and Ondřej Hudeček (Peacock, 2016).

Daughter was produced by Zuzana Roháčová at Prague's FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), in co-production with MAUR film, a Czech production company with many years of experience in the field of animation. The production of the film was supported by the Czech Film Fund as part of a package of three short animations called Three Voices, altogether with amount of 15 294 EUR.

The film world-premiered earlier this year at Annecy International Animation Film Festival and received there two awards - Cristal for a Graduation Film and Junior Jury Award for a Graduation Film... (read more)

ABOUT THE FILM

Daughter is a story of a girl who finds a dead bird and wants to share her pain with her father, hoping to find solace in his embrace. The father is preoccupied with his own worries: he is cooking lunch and pays no attention to his daughter’s state of mind and desires. The girl takes her father’s behaviour for rejection, cocooning herself in her inner world filled with a yearning for her father‘s love. From then on she grows increasingly distant from him and as an adult she cannot deal with any display of emotions from him. The guilt-ridden father tries to find a way of getting through to his daughter and rebuilding their shattered relationship. Only in hospital, when her father is dying, does the daughter understand that he has always loved her, in a final embrace of mutual forgiveness...

Kashcheeva: Parents sometimes can’t express their love for their child

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

On November 5th, FilmFestival Cottbus (FFC) will open its 29th edition in a festive ceremony in the Staatstheater Cottbus (Großes Haus). Opening film is the cross-border comedy SMUGGLING HENDRIX, the feature film debut of director Marios Piperides. The production, in which "Soul Kitchen" star Adam Bousdoukos plays the protagonist, has won numerous international awards, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

"The opening film SMUGGLING HENDRIX, set in Cyprus, is a mirror image of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: while we have been celebrating the fall of the Iron Curtain three decades ago, the island in the eastern Mediterranean has been divided by a heavily guarded border since 1974. At the same time, the film, co-produced by Greece, Cyprus and Germany, symbolizes the expansion of the territory of FilmFestival Cottbus, which this year will also show feature works from Finland, Turkey and Greece", says FFC Programme Director Bernd Buder. "SMUGGLING HENDRIX, which plays on the border between the Greek and Turkish parts of Cyprus and thus also between the European Union and the non-EU, fits in well with this broader Eastern Europe of the festival." 

Dialogue jury 
The perspectives with which the new film countries enrich the FFC are reflected in the composition of the festival's dialogue jury. The jury includes the Finnish-Russian actress Alina Tomnikov, the Athens-born director and producer Thanos Anastopoulos, who lives and works in Greece and Italy, as well as the Turkish filmmaker Aslı Özge, who has been based in Berlin since 2000. Özge impressed audiences at the major festivals in Locarno and Berlin with works such as MEN ON THE BRIDGE (2009) and AUF EINMAL (2016). The trio discusses which work from the 2019 FFC programme most convincingly artistically shapes intercultural dialogue in the sense of understanding between cultures. The winning film will receive prize money of EUR 3,000, donated by the Federal Foreign Office.

The opening film: SMUGGLING HENDRIX 
In SMUGGLING HENDRIX Adam Bousdoukos plays the unsuccessful musician Yiannis. The Greek Cypriot wants to leave Nicosia and Cyprus behind to start a new life in Western Europe. After his girlfriend has left him, dog Jimi remains his last ally. The dog named after the guitar god Hendrix, is running away into the Turkish part of the island – and an EU law strictly forbids animals to enter from the Turkish to the Greek side of the border... 

Download film stills SMUGGLING HENDRIX and FFC logo
www.filmfestivalcottbus.de/press 

About the FilmFestival Cottbus
The 29th FilmFestival Cottbus will take place from November 5 – 10, 2019. In four competitions and eleven side sections, the FFC will show around 200 films competing for prize money of more than EUR 80,000 and the coveted prize sculpture LUBINA (Sorbian: the Lovely). 
Over 22,000 spectators attended the Festival of Eastern European Film in Cottbus in 2018.
The 29th FilmFestival Cottbus is decisively supported by the Federal State of Brandenburg, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, the city of Cottbus, the Federal Foreign Office and the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Accreditation possible
Reporting press can now be accredited online here:
www.filmfestivalcottbus.de/accreditation

These grants were announced by the Georgian National Film Center (GNFC) on 10 September 2019.