“We will be the minority part- ner, but the financing is not yet completed, we are waiting to see if funds will arrive from Switzerland. We should know in around May or June. If all goes well production will begin by the end of the year”, explains Philipp Moravetz, the young producer and founder of the production company from Alto Adige along with Karl Baumgartner, proprietor of Germany’s “Pandora Film”, Andreas Pichler, director of documentary movies, and Georg Tschurtschentaler, a producer from Berlin.

Set up around one year ago, Echo Film will be at the Co-production Market in Berlin, “we were invited by the BLS along with some other producers from Alto Adige so that we could make contact with the other producers in Berlin”.

Germany is Echo’s first interlocutor seeing as half the founding partners has worked in the German movie industry for many years and, amongst the projects being developed by the company, there are various possible co-productions with Germany: “Spiral” is a dramatic movie that is being written by German director Hana Geißendorfer (the project has obtained development financing from the BLS).
“This story is particularly suitable for filming in Alto Adige”, continues Moravetz. “It is about a friendship between two girls that unfolds in the world of ice skating and is set in a large village or a small provincial town. It was discovered by Andreas Pichler at Torino Film Lab in 2011. Hana will come to Alto Adige in February to look for locations, and we will receive some help from Baumgarten who knows the German world well”.

Another movie project to come out of a script lab, and more precisely Racconti #1, the script lab set up by the BLS to encourage the writing of stories set in Alto Adige,

is “Zweitland” (the winner of the lab), for which Michael Kofler is writing the screenplay. “In this case we received funds from the Alto Adige German culture office as it is based on the recent history of the Alto Adige region (terrorism in the 60s) which is suitable for being co-produced with Germany or Austria. We will now make an application to the BLS pre-production fund which runs out at the end of January. In any case, I think we will have to wait until next year to go into production because it is a very complex movie, the same goes for “Porcelain Girl” by Anna Wasch, a great story that received a development contribution from the BLS over a year ago through Pandora Film, when Echo Film did not yet exist. This is also a complicated story which needs a few more drafts”.

The projects being developed by Echo also include “Tirollar” which, says Moravetz, “if all goes well, will be a co-production between Italy and Germany in which we will be the majority partner”.