The Development Award to “Wishing on a Star” is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the awards that WEMW assigns to participating projects, also thanks to the many and growing number of collaborations.
One of these, new for this year, is the collaboration with the European Women’s Audiovisual Network, the European association created to strengthen the female presence in cinema, that ‘brought’ to WEMW an award for a woman director, presented to Michela Occhipinti, the director of “Flesh Out”, produced by Gregorio Paonessa and Marta Donzelli’s Vivo Film.
“In recent years we have been producing more and more movies directed by women. Perhaps this is a good sign of the fact that, in Italy, there is a new generation of women who are working hard on strong, universal projects”, Marta Donzelli – who is on the “Women in the European Film Industry. Success Stories and Challenges” panel – has stated.
Even though it is small (€ 1500), this new award has already produced results seeing as, this year, 12 projects out of 22 were directed by women, “more than half and more than last year”comments Alessandro Gropplero.
And in general, a lot of women received awards this year: in addition to Barbiani and Occhipinti, Cecilia Frugiuele received the Producer’s Network Prize (free accreditation at the Producer’s Network, Cannes) for “Alfa” by Una Gunjak (Bosnia Herzegovina-Croatia). is award also went to Tekla Machavariani for the documentary “Before Father is Back” (Georgia-France-Germany). Nazli Elif Durli and Anna Maria Aslanoglu, director and producer of the Turkish film “Zuhal” won the Flow Postproduction Award (a discount on post-production costs to be realized at the Flow Postproduction studio).
Vicky Miha, producer (along with David Herdies) of “Madame Luna” won the TRL Espresso Award, thanks to which the project will also participate for free in MIA’s New Cinema Network in Rome and at Film London PFM in October.
‘Breaking’ this female string of award-winners, is Austria’s David Bohun of Mischief Films, who won the EAVE scholarship with “Queens”, written and directed by his brother Stefan Bohun.
Two awards were also assigned to the Last Stop Trieste projects (the workshop for documentaries on the ‘home stretch’ which have already been developed inside one of WEMW’s partner platforms), the HBO European Award for the value of € 2,000 to In Praise of Nothing, written and directed by Serbian Boris Mitic, and produced by the same (for Dribbling Pictures) together with Fabrizio Polpettini; and the Flow Digital Cinema Award (again offered by Flow Postproduction) went to the Polish project “The Runners” by Lukasz Borowski, produced by Zuzanna Krol for Wajda Studio.
An important new initiative arrives from Poland regarding the First Cut Lab, WEMW’s other fringe section, the program dedicated to drama features in the editing phase which, from this year, is realized in collaboration with the Polish Film Institute.
“A year ago I realized how important the First Cut Lab had been for the Polish project selected, and how much it had opened up new possibilities and also improved relations between director and producer. Perhaps we do not invest enough in the nal phase, the editing, which is the most delicate and diffcult part. I immediately thought of other Polish projects that could bene t from this program”.
This is how Robert Balinski of the Polish Film Institute explains the birth of this collaboration which will bring the First Cut Lab experts to one or more festivals in Poland (precisely which ones is still being defened), whilst a Polish expert will always be present at the workshop in Trieste.
“It would be very interesting if other countries followed this example so as to give producers more opportunities for participation throughout the whole year”.
