Projects by Agnieszka Zwiefka and Damian Kocur were among the winners at the 12th edition of Polish Days, the industry event for the Wroclaw-based New Horizons International Film Festival (July 20-30).
The No Problemo Music Award offering an audio network music license for the film and promotional materials worth 75,000 Zlotys (€17,000) went to Zwiefka’s part-animated documentary Runa which will be produced by Warsaw-based Chilli Productions with Danish producer Sigrid Dyekjaer of Real Lava and Heino Deckert’s Leipzig-based ma.ja.de.
Zwiefka, whose hybrid documentaries The Queen Of Silence and Scars were shown at festivals worldwide and won many awards, had pitched the project with Zofia Kujawska, her fellow producer at Chilli Productions.
The inspiration for this project came after the director joined a group of volunteers helping during the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarussian border where she met the 16-year-old Kurdish girl Runa and her family. A coming of age story filtered through the teenager’s point of view follows the young girl as she has to look after her four younger brothers and make a new life in Europe after her mother’s tragic death on the border,
“We are looking for the light in dark times,” said Zwiefka, adding that the animated sequences would be in the style of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.
The project had recently been presented at Sheffield MeetMarket as well as Krakow’s Docs to Go where the project won the FIXAFILM Postproduction Award.
No Problemo Music also gave awards of free music licenses to two projects in this year’s works-in-progress section: Maria Zbąska’s dramedy It’s Not My Film, produced by Inga Kruk’s Hi Movies, and Grzegorz Debowski’s political and social crime drama Next To Nothing.
A new award this year - the ORKA Postproduction Award covering the costs of image postproduction services (excluding VFX) to the value of 30,000 Zlotys (€6,800) - went to feature debutant Tadeusz Łysiak for his €2.5m psychological erotic thriller Obsession about the reaction of a husband and wife to the mysterious disappearance of their 10-year-old daughter.
In his pitch with producer Stanislaw Dziedzic of Film Produkcja, Łysiak, whose graduation film The Dress received an Oscar nomination in the best live-action short film category in 2022, said that he had been inspired by films made by David Fincher and Roman Polanski for the screenplay of Obsession.
The project, which Łysiak intends to shoot in the English language in autumn 2024, had previously been pitched at the Les Arcs Co-Production Village last December.
Meanwhile, the FIXAFILM Postproduction Award, which also offered to cover the cost of image postproduction services up to 30,000 Zlotys (€6,800), went to Damian Kocur’s second feature Under The Volcano which centres on a Ukrainian family on the last day of their holiday on Tenerife who are gradually transformed from tourists into refugees when their return home to Kyiv is thwarted by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
The €900,000 production by Mikołaj Lizut’s Lizart Film follows on Munk Film’s production of Kocur’s award-winning debut feature Bread and Salt which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year.
This year’s edition of Polish Days was attended by festival programmers from such festivals as the Berlinale, Venice, Hamburg, Göterborg and Cottbus as well as sales companies ranging from True Colours and Intrafilms through Film Republic and Pluto Film to Picture Tree International and New Europe Film Sales.
Attending the Polish Days for the first time this year, Denis Krupnov of UK-based Reason8 Films said that he had been “particularly impressed by the good mix of first-time directors and established names with genres on offer ranging from horror through drama to comedy.”
“What I found interesting was that a few of the projects in development or those in the work-in-progress section are being planned to be partially in the English language. The filmmakers clearly want to appeal to an international market by following this strategy.”
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