During the joint East European Brunch at the Representation of the Land Brandenburg to the Federation in Berlin, the Promotion Prize of the Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrechten (GWFF) of the 24th Film Festival Cottbus was awarded to the young Czech producer Michal Kráčmer, a student at the renowned film school FAMU in Prague. The GWFF scholarship endowed with 4,500 euro enables a study stay abroad.
In the frame of the reception, the East-West co-production market connecting cottbus awarded the coco Special Pitch Award to the winner of the Main Prize of last year’s FilmFestival Cottbus. The award is an invitation to the Russian director Ivan I. Tverdovsky to present his most recent project together with a producer at connecting cottbus 2015 (5-6 November 2015). Michael Kaczmarek, the German co-producer of the festival’s award-winning film, CORRECTIONS CLASS, accepted the prize in place of the director.
In addition to the awards ceremony and the premiere of the new festival trailer, which was again produced by a team of students from the Film University Babelsberg “Konrad Wolf” and directed by the student of film direction Sophie Linnenbaum, the brunch also offered initial insights into the programme of the anniversary edition of the FilmFestival Cottbus. The “Focus” section titled “Eastern Europe by Cities” will again be dedicated to the diversity of Eastern Europe. “In its twenty-fifth year, the FilmFestival Cottbus will focus on a theme revealing a specific range of diversity between subculture and new bourgeoisie, thus raising questions as to the current state of coexistence in society, between togetherness, living side by side and confrontation,” says Programme Director Bernd Buder, who after two successful years will continue to steer the festival’s thematic orientation in the coming years. The “globalEAST” programme section will again seek traces of Eastern European influences on cinema, this year looking to our western neighbour, the Netherlands.
The 25th FilmFestival Cottbus will take place from 3 to 8 November, 2015. Last year, the six festival days featured a total of 165 films from 39 countries and attracted more than 20,000 visitors to the cinemas and the events of the supporting programme.
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