Göteborg International Film Festival Fund awards CineLink project in Sarajevo
One of the awards handed out last Friday at the co-production market CineLink, at the Sarajevo Film Festival, carried the name Göteborg International Film Festival Fund. This is only one of many new international co-operations initiated by the film fund this autumn. Other new partners are the organisations Cinergia in Costa Rica, Arcadia in Guatemala, Sud Écriture in Tunisia, and Manana Youth Center in Armenia. Already existing partners are, among others, the film school Imagine in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Maisha Film Lab in Uganda.
Göteborg Film Festival Fund has, in cooperation with SIDA (The Swedish Development Cooperation Agency), since 1998 supported film production in emerging economies. Besides single film projects the fund also works actively with supporting training and education, work shops and technical facilities.
– After a positive answer from SIDA, this spring, guaranteeing continued financing of the fund for at least five more years, we can know get in to new long term committments, says Camilla Larsson, Head of Selection at Göteborg Film Festival Fund.
– We are of course very happy to be back in Sarajevo, since our to festivals have a history together. Göteborg has been supportive of Sarajevo since the start in 1995, first with Ship to Bosnia and then CineBosnia, a programme for Bosnian short film makers. For example Jasmila Zbanica, winner of the Golden Bear with the feature film Grbavica, in Berlin, last year. This is a region where very many exciting things are going on in the industry, but still with very limited resources, she continues.
The four awarded projects at CineLink 2007 was: First of All Felicia by Melissa de Raaf and Razvan Radulescu, Romania; White, White World by Milena Markovic and Oleg Novkovic, Serbia; Donkey by Antonio Nuic, Bosnia/Croatia; and Adrienn Pal by Agnes Kocsis and Andrea Roberti, Hungary.
Besides representatives from Göteborg International Film Festival Fund the jury consisted, among others, of representatives from The Hubert Bals Fund in Rotterdam, Cinéfondation in Cannes and Centre National de la Cinématographie in Paris.