Ida by Pawel Pawlikowski has won the European Parliament's LUX Prize 2014.

FNE spoke to the young Latvian producer and director Andris Gauja of The Lesson about how the new generation of Latvian filmmakers are using crowd funding, pitching sessions and other innovative tools to put films from small countries on the international map.

The launch of Slovakia’s Audiovisual Fund five years ago has reaped benefits for Slovak film production abroad and at home. Slovakia continues to find success internationally, powered by its documentary film production and more recently by genre-bending feature film productions informed by documentary techniques, with a pair of female directors receiving the lion’s share of laurels over the past year.

The Lithuanian film industry noted several recent successes with films selected for major festivals that found favour at the local box office and with the announcement that 23-year old Lithuanian actress Aistė Diržiūtė had been selected as one of the EFP Shooting Stars of 2015. The foreign film servicing industry continues to do well.

The State Cinematography Fund, Czech Republic has been the main tool for public support of cinematography in the Czech Republic since 1992. In 2013 it adopted a new Cinematography Act and became an independent institution with its own director, new financial structure and a Council assessing and deciding individual requests for state support.

After a gap in funding, production resumed in 2014, but the crisis was visible in the slow pace of foreign film productions shooting in Romania. New multiplexes opened and new distributors appeared, but the box office and the number of releases slightly fell after the soaring increases of the last few years.

“To sum up, I would emphasize a few things: Ogden Svilicic's These Are the Rules (Maxima Film) awarded in Venice; two films with nice admissions in cinemas – Kristian Milić’s Number 55 (Croatian Television) and Daniel Kušan’s Love and Death (Kinorama); production support given to an impressive number of first-time directors and great results of the cash rebate scheme that keeps bringing foreign productions to Croatia.” Producer Ankica Juric Tilic named these as the highlights of the Croatian cinema in 2014. On the downside, the box office declined and the domestic hits didn’t match the results of the domestic hits in 2013.