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Exclusive: The Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s industry-focused Agora section has selected 12 projects from 11 countries for this year’s Thessaloniki Pitching Forum and 11 films from 16 countries for the Agora Docs in Progress sidebar. Scroll down for the full list of projects.

All selected projects are from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean region.

The re-shaped Thessaloniki Pitching Forum is the festival’s co-financing and co-production forum for documentaries in development. Recent projects that have passed through the program include Boylesque, which premiered at Hot Docs 2022, Dead Sea Guardians, which premiered at Haifa Iff (2021) and was screened in Thessaloniki (2022), Karaoke Nation premiered at Cph: Dox (2022), A Steady Job premiered at Visions du Reel (2022), We Will Not Fade Away premiered at Berlinale 2023 and Mighty Afrin (Greece) premiered at Thessaloniki Idf 2023 and won the WWF Award.

This year, the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum has secured three new awards for its participants.

Fifteen countries represented amongst the 18 individuals.

European producers platform Ace Producers has selected 18 producers for the latest edition of its Ace Producers’ Network programme, running in 2022 and 2023.

The 18 producers include Nadim Cheikhrouha of France’s Tanit Films, who will produce Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s next feature Mime. Cheikhrouha and Ben Hania secured an Oscar nomination for best international feature film last year for The Man Who Sold His Skin.

Scroll down for the full list of producers

Sara Laszlo, CEO at Hungary’s Campfilm, is another Ace Producers participant, through Denes Nagy’s The Vacation. Laszlo’s previous...

Ammonite, Apples, Promising Young Woman, Supernova, The Dig, The Father and The Mauritanian are among the first wave of movies recommended by a European Film Awards committee for nomination at this year’s event.

A record number of movies have been suggested by the committee this year in light of the pandemic disruption. More than 40 films have been revealed today — features and docs — with more set to be revealed in September.

The feature films have been selected by a committee of the Academy Board and a range of European industry professionals. The documentary films have been selected by Efa Board Members Graziella Bildesheim (institutional/Italy) and Ada Solomon (producer/Romania), Katja Gauriloff, Kathrin Kohlstedde (festival programmer/Germany), Veton Nurkollari (artistic director/Kosovo), Orwa Nyrabia, Rada Šešić (festival programmer and filmmaker/Bosnia & Herzegovina/The Netherlands), Rajesh Thind and...

Producers of ‘Another Round’ and Silver Bear winner ‘Natural Light’ selected for networking platform.

The producer of Oscar winner Another Round is among those selected for European Film Promotion’s (Efp) networking platform Producers on the Move, which will again take place online.

The 20 producers selected for this year’s programme would usually gather at the Cannes Film Festival and take part in meetings, roundtable sessions and case studies. But although Cannes has committed to host a physical festival in July, Efp will run the programme online from May 17-21 to avoid possible pandemic restrictions.

Among this year’s line-up is Kasper Dissing,...

The producers of this year’s International Feature Film Oscar winner “Another Round” and Berlin Silver Bear winner “Natural Light” have been selected for European Film Promotion’s Producers on the Move program, which promotes promising producers and fosters international co-productions. The 20 participants for the program, which runs online from May 17-21, will be presenting their latest projects in speed meetings and during roundtable sessions. More than half of the selection are women.

The participants, who were selected for the program from all of the nominations submitted by the Efp member organizations, are Annabella Nezri (Belgium), Nikolay Mutafchiev (Bulgaria), Bojan Kanjera (Croatia), Marek Novák (Czech Republic), Kasper Dissing (Denmark), Jean-Christophe Reymond (France), Maite Woköck (Germany), Sára László (Hungary), Ruth Treacy (Ireland), Marica Stocchi (Italy), Iris Otten (The Netherlands), Gary Cranner (Norway), Beata Rzeźniczek (Poland), Tathiani Sacilotto (Portugal), Bianca Oana (Romania), Katarína Tomková (Slovak Republic), Andraž Jerič (Slovenia), Clara Nieto (Spain...

Hungarian director Marcell Gero has revealed the hurdles behind his documentary about murderers trying to reintegrate into society.

Cain’s Children is playing in the International Documentary Film competition at Zurich Film Festival and explores the fate of middle-aged men released from prison after committing murder as teenagers.

It marks the feature debut of Gero, who spoke to Screen in Zurich. The film-maker said: “The biggest challenge was to find these people. They are living at the edge of society in very difficult conditions. They are not on Facebook, you cannot Google them.

“It was a miracle that we found one. He helped us to find the second, who helped us find the third. It was like playing Sherlock Holmes.”

Producer Sara Laszlo said the film, which debuted at San Sebastian, will be broadcast on Arte France at the end of October and on HBO Europe end of November.

Gero added: “We have eight invitations to festivals...