Odessa International Film Festival

The second day of the Film Industry Office was full of events: Cinema: Backstage conference; Eurimages cultural support fund of the Council of Europe “How does it work?” presentation; “Film festivals between civil society values and politics” networking meeting and Odesa IFF ScripTeast Series Project with TV drama series pitching.

The second day of Film Industry Office section started with the Cinema: Backstage conference on Gender Equality – Myth and Reality.

Then followed the presentation for the film professionals from Eurimages cultural support fund of the Council of Europe “How does it work?”. Pylyp Illenko, the Head of Ukrainian State Film agency said: “It’s a great honor to get the official invitation to join Eurimages for Ukraine. And although we have to go through a series of things at the state level to make it work, Ukrainian producers are already quite experienced in cooperation, and "Donbass" by Sergei Loznitsa is a great example.”

Roberto Olla, Executive director of EURIMAGES cultural support fund of the Council of Europe, gave useful instructions to Ukrainian producers as for the terms of getting financial support that will be available after Ukraine provides the change in legislation. It will allow the country to join the international organization officially. Tamara Tatishvili, who represents Georgia in EURIMAGES and European Film Promotion, moderated the conference.

However, the key event of the day was the pitching of TV drama series of Central and Eastern Europe. The competition is organized by the OIFF with the support of StarMedia, the biggest international film company in Ukraine, and ScripTeast, the East European Scriptwriters Lab organized by Independent Film Foundation. The winner gets the suite of postproduction benefits amounting to 20000$ from StarMedia as an award.

6 projects took part in the pitching with 2 of them being Ukrainian. Agathe Bergman, a French producer, was the tutor for the projects.

The members of the international jury included: Laurence Herszberg, General director of Series Mania Festival (France) – Jury President; Vlad Riashin - general producer of Star Media (Ukraine); Dariusz Jablonski - President of the Independent Film Foundation (Poland); Meinolf Zurhorst - producer, film critic, head of the ARTE film department at ZDF (Germany); Klaus Zimmermann - managing partner of Dynamic Television (Germany); Brigitta Manthey - financial advisor at Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Germany).

The "Square" project for 2.9 million EUR was presented by the Directory Film Company and the pitching of this mystic TV series was presented by Ihor Savichenko, its producer, and Yevgeny Matvienko, the screenwriter. Ukrainian producers are planning to make the story about a series of mysterious murders in a small regional center of the 80s in co-production with several European countries.

"Hide and seek" which is another TV series by Film.ua tells a story of several children gone missing. The authors promise a detective drama. The screenwriter is Oleksandr Protsiuk. The budget constitutes 1.6 million EUR.

Macedonian cinematographers decided to bring to the pitching their criminal drama series called “Love and Hate” with the budget amounting to 800 000 EUR. The script was written by by Ognen Georgievski.

The project of the “Family Archives” series (Croatia) is a drama thriller about politics and the personal drama of a female politician. The script was written by Marjan Alcevski and Andamion Murataj. The budget is 1,028,000 EUR.

Historical drama by Hungarian authors called “Prison Hospital” describes a personal drama of a woman amidst the Revolution of 1956 in Budapest. The script was written by Marcell Patkai, the budget amounts to 1,600,000 EUR.

“Smokey Eyes” – a series from Poland is a dramedy about 5 female friends that happened to be trapped in a house in the mountains. The script was written by Malgorzata Pilacinska, the budget 1,500,000 EUR.

The winners of the pitching will be announced on July 20th.

The second day of the Film Industry Office also held a networking meeting on “Film festivals between civil society values and politics” moderated by Bernd Buder, Program Director of Cottbus Film Festival. The participants of the event included Julia Sinkevych, General Producer of the OIFF; Samaya Asgarova, Head of International Affairs Department (Azerbaijan); Virgiliu Margineanu, Director of OWH Studio, FIFD CRONOGRAF President (Moldova); Ana Chkonia, Program Coordinator at Tbilisi International film Festival; Vitaly Manski, documentary filmmaker, Artdocfest festival President (Russia); Igor Soukmanov, Program Director of Listapad Minsk International Film Festival; Melik Karapetyan, Head of Golden Apricot IFF President (Armenia).