Mogador's Christoph Thoke appointed member of Main Jury at ART FILM FEST, Kosice, Slovakia

Mogador Film is honoured and pleased to announce that Christoph Thoke, head of Mogador Film,

has just been appointed member of Main Jury at ART FILM FEST, Kosice, Slovakia.

The 26^th International Film Festival ART FILM FEST KOSICE will be held from June 15^th till 23^th 2018.

Thirteen films will be competing for the Blue Angel award,

which goes for Best Film, Best Director, Best Female Actress and Best Male Actor.

Bests from Germany,

i.a.

Tim Diestelmeier

Executive Assistant

To Christoph Thoke

Mogador Film

Berlin/Frankfurt/Mainz

Mogador Film

Industry Days

Announcing our Industry Programme

We are pleased to announce the official industry programme line up for 53rd Karlovy Vary IFF. You can find complete information here.

The KVIFF Eastern Promises Industry Days take place between July 1-5, 2018 and we look forward to welcoming close to 1,000 film professionals.

This year we have decided to travel even farther eastward by expanding the territory of our Works and Docs in Progress to include promising talents from the Middle East in addition to the entire interesting region of Eastern Europe. We are now also including Works in Development: Feature Launch from the region of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurimages Lab Project Award.  

Highlights for this year:

• Works in Progress – selected projects in production and post-production
• Docs in Progress – selected documentary projects in late stage of production and post-production or just finished
• Works in Development: Feature Launch - selected projects ready for co-production
• Eurimages Lab Project – selected projects in production and post-production
• Artisans in Focus panel
• Artificial intelligence and script analysis: Predicting commercial and critical success for European and independent film
• How to win over Generation Z for European film?
• New Creative Europe programme post 2020
• Touch Me Not: The politics of intimacy – open debate
• Fostering international development – open roundtables with TorinoFilmLab
• Creative Sharing: An open debate with filmmakers

We are close to completing our on-line Film Industry Guide. Access to the List of Attendees will be sent to all accredited Film Proffesionals in the next edition of our Newsletter, along with the list of selected projects for this year’s edition.

We are looking forward to see you very soon at Karlovy Vary!

The 20th edition of connecting cottbus, the East-West co-production market at the FilmFestival Cottbus, is currently open for submissions. Ten pitch projects and five works in progress will be selected for coco 2018 to compete for a variety of awards.

For the newly founded Work in Progress section at coco, we are happy to welcome back our partner D-FACTO MOTION. The renowned post- production studio with branches in five major German cities and the latest high-end technology will sponsor the D-Facto Motion WiP Award of €35,000 in-kind services.

Our industry audience will vote for the best pitch to receive the coco Best Pitch Award, which includes accreditation to the Cannes Producers Network 2019 and a cash award towards development. This year, we present a new award from our partner MIDPOINT, a training and networking platform for script and project development. The MIDPOINT Consulting Award will consist of individual consultancy with MIDPOINT experts to further develop the winner's script and project.

Last but not least, we are proud to welcome our new sponsoring partner from Romania, AVANPOST, one of Eastern Europe’s most comprehensive post- production outfits, offering the Avanpost Pitch Packaging Award, including strategy consulting and storyboarding as well as production/post-production for a proof of concept.

Producers can submit their feature fiction film projects in development for the coco Pitch section until 18 July 2018, and projects in production or post- production for coco Work in Progress until 22 August 2018. The film project’s subject must be connected to Eastern Europe or the producer must be based in this region.

Producers, sales agents, commissioning editors and other industry representatives active in East-West European co-production can apply without a project by 5 October 2018.

The international event, held from March 19th to March 23rd at the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, introduced seven renowned filmmakers in addition to quality films. During the five-day program, they held masterclasses and discussions with participants.

A balanced program from the world of film production was presented by Haneke's long-term  editor Monika Willi, the favorite of world-wide film festivals Sergei Loznitsa, production designer of Cuarón´s ROMA Eugenio Caballero, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, who has an Oscar nomination for Nebraska, Citizenfour cinematographer Kirsten Johnson and others.

The opening film of the event was the award-winning black and white film ROMA by Alfonso Cuarón. It was personally introduced by the film’s production designer, the Oscar-winning Eugenio Caballero. The Mexican filmmaker had a lecture on production design in film the next day, where he mentioned: „A production designer is one of the key figures in making a film. For me, production design is not an aesthetic discipline but a narrative. It's not just what it looks like, but the fact that everything we see on the screen is connected with the director's effort to tell the story. And finally, to feel emotions.”

The program continued with a lecture by Moroccan guest Hakim Belabbes, who explained the conditions for the creation of the Sahara Lab. This offers a chance for ambitious filmmakers in Morocco to study film. An important message that Hakim emphasized to the forum's visitors was: „I wasted so much time copying instead of bringing a personal message. I didn't find the message in the movies of other directors, in the theoretical books, but in the voice of my mother, my children, and the moments of silence on my way home."

Wednesday evening ended with the screening of the film Cameraperson, which was personally presented by producer, cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. The screening was followed by a discussion during which American filmmaker was not afraid to come among participants and ask questions. The intensive interactive discussion attracted the audience, who also came to see her masterclass the following day. Kirsten Johnson ended the masterclass with a social experiment, where participants in the cinema were gazing intently into the eyes of another participant for two minutes. Kirsten: „Director of photography shouldn't be afraid to watch, observe, keep eye contact. Sometimes it is uncomfortable to see and be seen. Such fear and shame should not be present when filming a movie. By visualizing we will learn more than by talking, by using words.”

The rest of the day belonged to the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, whose lecture brought a number of interesting starting points for shooting. In the evening he presented his film The Trial at Cinema Lumiére, where he was also awarded with the Prize for the contribution to auteur cinema by the Association of Slovak Film Clubs. Sergei Loznitsa says: „I think that the future of film can be in archives. With technology, cinema can also go in this direction.”

Friday began with a masterclass on the distribution of short and feature films. This was led by a sales agent from Poland, Marcin Łuczai who is working for New Europe Film Sales. In the evening, Haneke's long-term editor, Monika Willi, came to present her masterclass on the creation of a material story. In the evening, she personally presented Untitled, which she completed after the death of the director Michael Glawogger. Willi: „Michael Haneke has a movie in his head before he stars shooting. He wants to cut chronologically, and the first cut design is created during filming when daily materials come. Unlike other directors, who, on the contrary, collect all the material and want the best of the film to appear in the editing room.”

Saturday's program was dedicated to the director of photography Phedon Papamichael. In addition to a masterclass in the evening, he personally introduced the film Nebraska by director Alexander Payne, that got 6 Oscar nominations. Papamichael: „The most important benefit of a film school is to find your director, your group and the collaborators you can work with after school."

The filmmakers themselves and the school representatives came to present the student projects. In the discussion after screenings, students talked about the films themselves, as well as the conditions in which the films were made.

Visegrad Film Forum 2019
Date: 19th – 23rd of March 2019
Place: Bratislava, Slovakia
Venues: Film and TV Faculty VŠMU, Cinema Lumière

web: http://www.visegradfilmforum.com
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VisegradFilmForum
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vffbratislava/
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mpj2r4K88c

Organized by: Boiler NGO
Co-organized by: Film and TV Faculty VŠMU
Financial support: International Visegrad Fund, Slovak Audiovisual Fund, Nadácia SPP

Partner schools:  FTF VŠMU Bratislava, WRiTV Katowice, UTB Zlín,  SZFE Budapest, KNUTCT Kiev, BFM Tallin, Sahara Lab a UNATC Bucharest

On Wednesday, 20 March, the shooting of the new live-action feature Deadlock by the writer and director Vinko Möderndorfer began in Seča in the Slovenian Littoral. Most of the film, however, will be shot in Ljubljana and in the Viba Film Studio.   

The story describes an encounter between two married couples from the opposite ends of the social scale, which, at first glance, seem to have nothing in common. However, an accident and a tragic event bring these people together fatefully in a single night and most likely until the rest of their lives.

Möderndorfer had the following to say about his new film: "We live in the times when the absence of any empathy in interpersonal relations is one of the most pressing issues all over the world. The brutal and ruthless capitalism tears people and their relationships apart from day to day, pushing the world into a war of everyone against everybody else. Empathy, compassion, attention towards our nearest and dearest, the capacity to feel the pain of others – all of this seems to be vanishing from the face of the world. I think it is important to tell a story in which human relations can live fully again and where the sympathy and sensitivity for others are once again established as an important value of today's civilisation. The world in which we live is in a deadlock. We are stuck in a sort of a civilisational standstill that will be impossible to get out of without understanding each other and observing the fundamental human and humanist values.«

Starring Mirjam Korbar, Peter Musevski, Uroš Fürst and Barbara Cerar. Co-starring: Ivo Ban, Klemen Kovačič, Mila Fürst, Benjamin Krnetič, Branko Završan, and others.

Producer: Eva Rohrman; director of photography: Mitja Ličen; editor: Andrija Zafranović; production designer: Dušan Milavec; costumes designer: Alenka Korla; makeup designer: Mojca Gorogranc Petrushevska; sound recordist: Peter Žerovnik; sound designer: Julij Zornik; production manager: Matija Kozamernik.

The film is produced by Forum Ljubljana, co-produced by Delirium from Serbia, and co-financed by the Slovenian Film Centre and Film Center Serbia. The realisation was made possible by Viba Film Studio.

The producer of the film Eva Rohrman also revealed that she expects additional co-producers and co-financers to take part in the project in the course of the production, but the final decisions regarding this issue have not yet been reached.  

Vinko Möderndorfer wrote and directed three internationally-renowned and award-winning live-action features (Suburbs, 2004; Landscape No. 2, 2008; Inferno, 2014), all of which have premiered and been screened at the most prestigious A-list film festivals: Venice, Montreal, Karlovy Vary, Cannes, Busan, Tallinn, etc., and have won numerous awards at home and abroad.

Vinko Möderndorfer belongs among the most renowned Slovenian artists. His extensive opus includes more than a hundred theatre and opera directions, sixteen TV directions, and a hundred radio plays. He has written more than seventy books and forty dramas. He has received more than forty awards in the fields of literature, drama, theatre, television, and radio, including the Prešeren's Fund Award, the Župančič Award, several Borštnik Awards, the Marjan Rožanc Award, several Grum Awards, the Ježek Award, several awards for best comedy, the Cup of Immortality, the Večernica Award, several Desetnica Awards, and other important acknowledgements.

The film crew dedicated the beginning of the shooting to the recently deceased Slovenian director Polona Sepe.