The world premiere of the film Stories from the Chestnut Woods at the Toronto Film Festival

The live-action feature Stories from the Chestnut Woods by the director Gregor Božič and screenwriter and producer Marina Gumzi will have its world premiere at the film festival in Toronto, one of the most important film events in the world, which is taking place between 5 and 15 September. The Toronto International Film Festival started out in 1976, and it is currently attended by approximately 480,000 visitors each year. The world premiere of the film, taking place on Sunday, 8 September, will be attended by both filmmakers mentioned above. The premiere will be followed by four other screenings – two for the professional audience and two more for accredited attendees. For his live-action short titled Shoes from Trieste (2014), Božič received the Vesna Award for Best Student Film at the Festival of Slovenian Film.

Stories from the Chestnut Woods, produced by the Nosorogi production house, was among the first films to have been chosen for this year's Discovery festival section, in which authors of first and second films will be presented. As of this year, the section in question as well as the whole of the festival programme will be somewhat different: in view of the large number of films, competing for the festival selection, the section is becoming increasingly exclusive.

Božič's debut has been shot on 16 and 35mm film. The story takes place shortly before World War II in the villages of the Venezia Giulia region near the border between Slovenia and Italy, at the time when these parts suffered severe poverty and faced an exodus of the local population that lasted for years. The atmosphere reminiscent of fairy tales is conveyed by the tales of the last inhabitants of these forested valleys who have not yet decided to leave their homes.

The film's crew and cast are international: filmmakers from seven countries have participated in the production. Starring Massimo De Francovich, Giusi Merli, Ivana Roščić and featuring Tomi Janežič, Anita Kravos, Nataša Keser and Janez Škof in supporting roles. The programme selector of the Discovery festival section Dorota Lech wrote the following about the film, among other things: "During his research of heirloom fruit varieties of the littoral region, Gregor Božič discovered the mighty chestnuts that grow in the area of Venezia Giulia as well as the stories of the people who had planted them there. Each image on this 35-millimetre film abounds in cultured beauty and is accompanied with mysterious theremin music. The film is a poetic and soul-stirring debut, a touching homage to the forgotten land and its inhabitants.«

The Discovery section prides itself in its visionary eye for discovering new authors that will shape the global film landscape in the future. The world-renowned directors whose first films have been presented precisely in this section include, among others: Chantal Akerman, Christopher Nolan, Yorgos Lanthimos, Lav Diaz, Michael Haneke, Jafar Panahi, Maren Ade, Joachim Trier, David Gordon Green, and Valeska Grisebach.

Last year, the multiple award-winning film Consequencesby the screenwriter and director Darko Štante was invited to this programme. After the premiere in Toronto, it continued its successful film festival tour: by the end of June, it was screened at 27 festivals and received five awards. It was also purchased for distribution in the United States, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and France, where it is currently being shown in the cinemas.

Stories from the Chestnut Woods is a Slovenian-Italian coproduction. Its development took approximately seven years, and it was produced by the Zavod Nosorogi production house. The film, whose realisation was co-financed by the Slovenian Film Centre, also received financial aid from international funds like Creative Europe – the MEDIA sub-programme and Eurimages. Besides the Italian production house Transmedia Production, the film was also coproduced by RTV Slovenija and Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB). At the last year's Trieste Film Festival, the project received the This is IT Award for the most promising first film in postproduction. Already before the beginning of the festival, the film's international representation was taken over by the agent Cercamon, who also represents the multiple award-winning film Winter Flies by the Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu.

In the context of Industry Centre, nine European countries will be presented this year under the umbrella of the European Film Promotion, including Slovenia with its Slovenian Film Centre, a member of the EFP.

Six projects of TV series, three projects of web series and two development executive participants are very close to conclude with our intense 9-month training within the TV Launch program.

The following grants were announced by the Czech Film Fund on 9 August 2019.

Docu Talents from the East 2019 will be presented in Sarajevo

Ten outstanding Central and Eastern European documentary projects in production and post-production will be presented on August 18 during the Sarajevo Film Festival. The most promising projects will receive the Docu Talent Award in cooperation with Current Time TV. The award is accompanied by a financial prize in the amount of 5,000 USD. In Sarajevo, we will also be announcing the Emerging Producers 2020. Hoping to meet you there!

Time to submit your applications for the Ji.hlava Industry Programme

September 15 is the deadline for registrations to Festival Identity, which annually brings to Jihlava dozens of film festival representatives to share and exchange their experience. Until September 15, you can also register for Conference Fascinations – a meeting of experimental documentary film distributors and gallerists, organized in partnership with Kunsthalle Praha. We will be announcing further planned activities of the 2019 Ji.hlava Industry Programme in the coming weeks and early bird Industry accreditations for film professionals will be available from September 1.

Are you finalising film for the autumn? Get to us!

This year’s Ji.hlava will offer nine competitions, which include the Between the Seas section for the best Central and Eastern European Documentaries,  the First Lights for documentary debuts, and the Opus Bonum section featuring the most outstanding world documentary films. In case you are still finishing your film and consider the premiere at the 23rd Ji.hlava IDFF, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. from our programme department.

Best Festival Poster competition

Each year, we present two awards for the best film festival posters: The audience award and the award of the jury composed of representatives of film festivals that participate in the Ji.hlava's Festival Identity meeting. We invite film festivals to send us their posters from the years 2018-2019 by September 15 and have them displayed at the very heart of the festival along with visuals of dozens of other film events from across the world. Find out more about the submission process here.

Meet Ji.hlava IDFF at other festivals 

You can meet members of the Ji.hlava IDFF team at some of the upcoming film festivals. Our programmer, Andrea Slováková, is currently at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival and will also be attending the Locarno FF (August 11 – 13) and Venice FF (August 28 – 31). More members of our team will be in Sarajevo on August 16 – 20 at the Docu Talents presentations. We will be happy to meet you on these occasions!

Subscribe to stream docs online on DAFilms with 40% summer sale

Broaden your horizons and watch the best world documentaries from the comfort of your home. Online platform for documentary films DAFilms.com brings 40% discount on yearly subscription. For 36 EUR, you can get more than 1900 films. To better navigate the vast offer, DAFilms selects the best films in their curated programmes. Right now you can watch the latest Balkan documentaries handpicked in collaboration with Dokufest Kosovo.

Tartu Love Film Festival unveils full programme

The Tartu Love Film Festival aka TARTUFF will screen a programme of 11 features and 4 documentaries, mixing international festival circuit favourites from recent years alongside cinematic classics and setting a special focus on music.

The festival’s feature film selection is headed by the Sundance audience award winner Queen of Hearts, the sophomore work by Danish director May el-Toukhy who presents a provocative tale of a woman who puts her career and family under severe pressure when she starts an affair with her teenage stepson.

It is accompanied by another US festival audience award winner - To Dust - that received the honour after its world premiere at Tribecca last year. The story, by writer-director Shawn Snyder and co-writer Jason Begue, follows a heartbroken orthodox Jew who can’t fully come to terms with the loss of his wife, acquiring an unorthodox interest in the decomposition process of her body.

Another critical highlight of the programme is Berlinale’s Generation Crystal Bear winner Stupid Young Heart by Selma Vihunen, the Finnish story about an adolescent couple, where the girl gets accidentally pregnant and tries to accept her responsibilities, while Lenni, the young father-to-be is being lured by the local right-wingers to join their (self-) destructive cause. 

Music - the ultimate expression of love

‘Music is one of the most effective ways of expressing love,’ declared the festival’s Head of Programme, Dagmar Raudam, commenting on one of the notable themes pervading TARTUFF’s programme this year. The festival will hold the world premiere of Jonathan McHugh’s documentary Long Live Rock, a study of the passion for rock music and concerts, as seen through the eyes of the members of bands such as Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Korn, Rob Zombie and the film’s protagonists - the fans.

Swiss director Sophie Huber has chronicled the story of the most influential jazz record labels of all time in her documentary Blue Note Records - Beyond the Notes - that housed some of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century - Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Art Blakey and - Miles Davis - also a central figure in another film in the festival’s programme. Academy Award-nominated actor Don Cheadle’s directorial debut Miles Ahead is character-study of the legend during his 5-year hiatus from performing any music due to depression and drug abuse.

A cinephile and reggae-lover, British director Peter Webber has documented the story of the collective formed by pioneering reggae performers in the eponymous Inna De Yard, Jamaica’s equivalent to the Buena Vista Social Club.

Following a screening at Sundance and screening currently in the US and UK, the festival has also selected Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, the story of songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen and his great love and muse Marianne Ihlen who both passed away in 2016, three months apart from each other.

The three classic titles to be screened also bare a strong relationship to music Velvet Goldmine (1998) centres on characters reminiscent of early 70’s glam rock, while Romeo + Juliet (1996) is a 90’s take on the biggest love story of them all, mixing Shakespeare’s original dialogue with a 90’s rock-infused soundtrack that won the Silver Bear for Leonardo Dicaprio and the Alfred Bauer prize for director Baz Luhrmann at Berlinale in 1997. The selection is rounded off by the animation milestone The Yellow Submarine (1968), inspired by the oeuvre of The Beatles.

About TARTUFF

The 14th edition of the Tartu Love Film Festival aka TARTUFF, organised by the team at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, runs from the 12th until the 17th of August. It is the biggest open-air film festival in the Baltics, that erects a public screen in the Town Hall Square of Tartu for a week, screening up to two films every evening, free of charge to an audience of nearly 2000 people each night. Additionally, the festival screens documentaries in the historic Athena theatre.

Feature films 
(displaying only films that are in English or screened with English subtitles)

Ditte & Louise, Denmark, 2018, director Niclas Bendixen
Euphoria, Sweden, UK, Germany, 2017, director Lisa Langseth
Miles Ahead, USA, 2015, director Don Cheadle
Queen of Hearts, Denmark, Sweden, 2019, director May el-Toukhy
Romeo + Juliet, USA, 1996, director Baz Luhrmann
Stupid Young Heart, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, 2018, director Selma Vilhunen
Swoon, Sweden, 2019, director Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein
The Journey - A Story of Love, Switzerland, 2018, director Fanny Bräuning
To Dust, USA, 2018, director Shawn Snyder
Velvet Goldmine, USA, 1998, director Todd Haynes
When Mom is Away, Italy, 2019, director Alessandro Genovesi
Yellow Submarine, UK, USA, 1968, director George Dunning

Documentaries
(displaying only films that are in English or screened with English subtitles)

Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, Switzerland, USA, UK, 2018, director Sophie Huber
Inna de Yard: The Soul of Jamaica, France, 2019, director Peter Webber
Long Live Rock, USA, 2019, director Jonathan McHugh
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, USA, 2019, director Nick Broomfield

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European Film Promotion and the Arab Cinema Center Announce the First Arab Critics’ Award for European Films 

EFP (European Film Promotion) has started to discover the Arab world and is now partnering with the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) to launch an Arab Critics’ Award for European Films dedi- cated to European cinema. A jury of 30 of the most prominent and influential Arab film critics, put together by ACC, will select the best European film out of nominations by the European national film institutions – EFP’s member organisations. The award will be announced at the Cairo International Film Festival in November 2019. 

Maher Diab and Alaa Karkouti, co-founders of the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) outline how the initiative evolved: "Since its inception, the Arab Cinema Center strives to exchange knowledge and cultures and promote films between different countries inside and outside the Arab world. We also aim to raise the appreciation of film criticism in the Arab world and highlight its role. In order to do so, we launched the Critics’ Award for Arab Films, and then the Achievement Award for Film Critics, which honours Arab and foreign film critics who influence the Arab film industry, and now as a new step toward this goal, we have created the Arab Critics’ Award for European Films in partnership with European Film Promotion.” 

EFP’s Managing Director Sonja Heinen comments on the new initiative: “We are delighted to take our cooperation with the ACC – which started with annual meetings between Arabian pro- ducers and EFP’s Producers on the Move in Cannes – a step further. The award helps us to pro- mote and intensify the buzz for European films in the Arab world. We hope that it will help us cultivate a true and sustainable interest in European cinema in the region. We would also like to thank the Cairo International Film Festival for giving us the platform to present the award and inviting the winner as part of their European programme.” 

About the Arab Cinema Center 

Organized by MAD Solutions, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) is now celebrating the fifth year since its inception in 2015. A non-profit organization registered in Amsterdam, the ACC is an international promotional platform for Arab cinema as it provides the filmmaking industry with a professional window to connect with their counterparts from all over the world through a number of its organised events. The ACC also provides networking opportunities with repre- sentatives of companies and institutions specialized in co-production and international distribu- tion, among others.

For more information please visit: www.acc.film 

About EFP 

EFP (European Film Promotion) is an international network of film promotion institutes from 37 countries from throughout Europe, each representing their national films and talent abroad. Under the EFP flag, these organisations come together to promote the diversity and spirit of European cinema and talent at key film festivals and markets, in particular outside of Europe. EFP is financially supported by the Creative Europe – MEDIA Programme of the European Union and by its member organisations. The Hamburg-based office is backed by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and the Ministry of Culture of the City of Hamburg.

For more information please visit www.efp-online.com

EFP Press contact: Doris Bandhold, Press & Communication: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. phone: +49 40 398 40 3-16