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Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s Baltic Event Co-Production Market has selected 14 feature projects for its 2024 edition.

Titles include Anastasiya Gruba’s debut Women Suicide Season, a co-production between Ukraine through Oleksandra Kostina’s Bosonfilms and Germany. The film centres on a man who escapes from his mother to a hermit’s life in a trailer; only for his loneliness to be interrupted by suicidal women who are drowning nearby.

Scroll down for the full list of projects

Women Suicide Season has participated in numerous labs and development workshops, including the Marche du Film’s Pop Up Film Residency and Global Media Makers LA Residency.

The surface glamor and beauty of Nice is peeled away from the off in Akaki Popkhadze’s debut feature “In The Name Of Blood” (“Brûle le sang”) which premieres in San Sebastian’s New Director section.

“Nice is a city where the rich and the poor live side by side.” the director tells Variety. “The poor neighborhoods are just a few minutes by tramway from the center. No need to drive hours to see the dirt. I think the particularity of Nice is that poor people live surrounded by palm trees, beautiful landscapes, super cars, casinos, a seaside full of tourists and it can make people dizzy and give them the wrong life-goals. For me all this is just appearance.”

The opening shot tracks from a postcard scene of Nice’s curved bay out to show a chain link fence, the high rise apartments and the highway of an oft ignored side to Nice.

The 19 year-old Turkish director Ferit Kilic was awarded the top prize at Transilvania Pitch Stop (Tps) in Romania at the weekend for his debut feature project Dancing Angels, produced by Diloy Gülün of Istanbul-based Karma Films.

Tps is the pitching event of the Transilvania International Film Festival’s Ro Days industry programme.

Kilic won the €25,000 prize for post-production services from Chainsaw Europe for his project about a troubled 15 year-old boy who finds solace in dancing.

“It’s based on my own experiences and those of many kids I interviewed, many things I’ve seen in my own school life,” said the director,...

This year’s Transylvanian Film Festival includes a new industry focus on genre projects from Central and Eastern Europe. The Full Moon Creative Lab, initiated by the festival together with Romanian Film Promotion launches this year with a focus on thriller, horror and fantasy TV series projects.

The Lab builds on the festival’s Full Moon Script Contest, launched in 2020, which awards three creative residencies a year to winning writers in Transylvania. Full Moon Creative Lab project manager Ileana Cecanu said the response to the new TV program, first unveiled a year ago, has “exceeded all expectations.” Cecanu said she trusts we’ll soon seen the projects pitching at Full Moon this year on a TV or streaming platform in the near future. “I’d definitely be the first one binging them,” she says.

The three projects selected for the Full Moon Creative Lab program, which focuses on enhancing creators...

Debut fiction features by Romania’s Cristian Pascariu, Ukraine’s Valeria Sochyvets and Turkey’s Alkim Özmen are among 10 projects selected for Transilvania Pitch Stop (Tps) on June 20-21.

The international co-production platform takes place during the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj, Romania, and is part of the industry strand Ro Days.

Titles selected include Cristian Pascariu’s A Flower Is Not A Flower about an 11-year-old girl Ana who escapes from a communist Romanian orphanage into the sewers of Bucharest where she has to use her ingenuity to survive. It is a Romanian-Latvia co-production between Point Film and Riga-based Air Productions.

Canan, the hardworking legal-eagle protagonist of Hesitation Wound, moves through drab institutional corridors with such determination that she creates a kind of force field around her. Or maybe it’s armor. In the courthouse where she spends a good part of her waking hours, she’s trying to save an accused man from the possibility of life imprisonment. In the hospital where she spends her nights, she’s looking for reasons to keep her mother on life support, despite the certainty of the doctor — and, more to the point, of Canan’s sister — that it’s time to let go.

Unfolding at the intersection of regulatory procedure, moral urgency and heartache, Selman Nacar’s finely tuned second feature, after the workplace drama Between Two Dawns, packs a sustained wallop of tension and unraveling into its impressively concise running time. Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained...

Some 400 film professionals have signed an open letter in support of the organisation’s former director.

Gaga Chkeidze, who was dismissed as director of the Georgian National Film Centre (Gnfc) last month, has spoken out about his removal, claiming it is part of a wider campaign of cultural censorship in the country.

Chkeidze was suddenly dismissed from his position in mid-March by Thea Tsulukiani, the country’s minister of culture and deputy prime minister, shortly before his three-year term was to expire. The ministry cited alleged financial irregularities following an internal audit of the Gnfc as the reason behind the removal.

Leading German production banner Augenschein Filmproduktion, is launching an in-house worldwide sales and financing division that will be spearheaded by former Telepool executive Jonathan Saubach (pictured).

The new division will be called Augenschein Sales and will focus on financing the company’s production slate through access to equity, market pre-sales and film funds in order to retain creative and financial control over projects.

In this new role, Saubach will report to Augenschein Filmproduktion founders Maximilian Leo and Jonas Katzenstein, and will be in charge of financing, packaging and worldwide sales of its film titles. He will also serve as an executive producer on Augenschein’s upcoming productions.

Saubach previously held senior sales, acquisitions and content executive roles for Telepool Gmbh, the German licensing, production and distribution company owned by actor Will Smith and Swiss investor Elysian Fields.

Augenschein Filmproduktion specializes in director-driven movies with global appeal and boasts more than...

German indie Augenschein, whose credits include Netflix sci-fi Stowaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt thriller 7500, is launching Augenschein Sales, an in-house worldwide sales and financing arm.

The new operation will be headed by Jonathan Saubach as Head Of Sales. The acquisitions exec joins from Will Smith-owned Telepool.

The new division will focus on combining the financing for the company’s production slate through access to equity, market pre-sales and film funds. Saubach will be in charge of financing, packaging and worldwide sales of the company’s film titles and will also serve as an executive producer on upcoming productions. He will report to Augenschein founders Maximilian Leo and Jonas Katzenstein.

During his ten-year tenure at Telepool the company acquired Ryan Gosling starrer Drive, The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, The Hitman’s Bodyguard starring Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson and Gary Oldman, the Has Fallen franchise starring Gerard Butler,...

When Netflix recommendation listed this work under ‘Hidden gems for you’, I took notice as I have been fortunate with this segment in the past. Though the title sounded cheesy, I was hoping that it was a play on words before revealing what is behind the curtain and I was not disappointed.

Manana is a daughter/wife/mother/teacher in her fifties who lives with the rest of her family in an apartment in a Georgian town. The quarters are just big enough for its seven inhabitants to call it home, but not large enough for peaceful coexistence. It is her birthday and friends and family gather to celebrate and wish her well, even when that is not Manana wants. The next day she informs her family that he has found another apartment in a different district and will be moving for good, as they are all capable of taking care of themselves.

When Ketie Danelia was approached a few years ago with the script for “And Then We Danced,” Levan Akin’s gay romantic drama about a young man’s sexual awakening in the masculine world of Georgian dance, the producer knew the risks. “Everyone was telling me not to take this project, because it’s very dangerous. Which turned out to be true,” she tells Variety.

In a conservative, patriarchal country where the powerful Orthodox Church holds tremendous sway, filming was a challenge. Locations would balk at the last minute, concerned about the potential backlash; far-right groups threatened the cast and crew. When the movie finally premiered in Tbilisi in 2019, after bowing in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight to rave reviews, police units had to escort moviegoers into the cinema. Yet through it all, Danelia remained undaunted. “I knew why I was doing it,” she says.

“And Then We Danced” is among a...

Turkish-French-Romanian co-production “Between Two Dawns,” helmed by Turkish writer-director Selman Nacar and produced by Burak Çevik of Kuyu Film and Diloy Gülün of Karma Films, is taking part in Wip Europa – a section devoted to projects in post-production – at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

At Wip Europe, the filmmakers showed a picture-locked version of the film, a drama that takes place when a worker is severely injured in a sheet factory run by the family of Kadir. To protect the family business, Kadir is forced to conspire in a cover-up that alters the lives of the people involved and unveils long-held secrets.

“The film takes place over the course of 24 hours,” says Nacar. “I always wanted to make a film that takes place over a short amount of time. Then I want to show how human beings can change psychologically and emotionally in that short time. The scenes are all filmed in one shot.

As the world witnessed earlier this year in Cannes, film festivals — as with every other institution in the #MeToo era — are under the microscope. Observers and activists alike now carefully scrutinize the number of films made by women, the composition of juries, and any fest statement on sexual harassment policies.

How will the Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival, running June 29-July 7 this year, deal with these issues and others in the wake of May’s Cannes protests and changes, which included the banning of red-carpet selfies and embargoes on press screenings? Executive director Krystof Mucha and artistic director Karel Och talked with Variety about their strategies.

Regarding sexual harassment, Mucha says he does not see the need for a reporting hotline or other protections of the kind set up this year by other fests, including Cannes.

“It needs to be said that Kviff is an event of which the more...

There must be something really frightening in a 50-year-old woman deciding to give up her role as diligent housewife and mother, especially when it is the only one she can aspire to in a strictly patriarchal society. Manana (Nata Murvanidze), the heroine of Ana Urushadze’s strikingly daring and assured debut feature, is scary that way. Best First Feature at Locarno, winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and later selected as Georgia’s entry for Best Foreign Feature at the Oscars, Urushadze’s Scary Mother joins another 2017 Georgian female-centered festival darling, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’s poignant My Happy Family, to deliver an entrancing portrait of a woman who embarks on a mid-age quest to escape from a stultifying male-dominated world.

For Manana, the quest starts with a book. An aspiring writer who sacrificed her literary ambitions for a quiet homely life with a condescending husband and three kids,...

For my money, the best thing about Netflix isn’t the high profile movies and splashy zeitgeist capturing shows they produce (and I say this as a fan of both “Mindhunter” and “The Crown”), but the space they afford for smaller films and niche programming. I’m thrilled the steaming giant has given a home to gems like “My Happy Family” and “On Body And Soul” (go watch them now), and if they spend some of their billions on projects like the upcoming “Wild Wild Country,” I’ll keep subscribing.

We pretty much knew last year’s Best Picture Oscars race was coming down to La La Land and Moonlight right after the completion of the Toronto International Film Festival in September. But while there’s something to be said about the strength of films able to ascend to frontrunner position, I can’t help loving the idea of heading into March without a clue as to who might win. Ask ten different critics what their favorite of 2017 is and I’d estimate hearing at least eight unique titles. There’s a level of excitement to this reality that we frankly haven’t had in quite some time. It’s anyone’s game.

Unlike past years where the safe nominees were lacking that sense of out-of-nowhere creativity and pathos beyond tried-and-true molds, 2017’s field is inspiring in its diversity. And those twenty or so films with a real chance at a nomination are legitimately good.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the title of the Georgian drama “My Happy Family” is ironic. Directors Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Grob plunge into the restless lifestyle of 52-year-old Manana (Ia Shuvliashvili), the matriarch of a cramped and multigenerational household that includes her husband, grown children, parents and various in-laws who pull her from every angle. And it doesn’t take long for Mañana to realize that to escape the mayhem, much to the shock of everyone around her, she can simply move out.

The ease with which she embarks on this new stage, even as it baffles her entire community, speaks to the remarkable blend of comedy and sadness that characterizes this sophomore effort from the directors of “In Bloom.” It’s at once a celebration of individuality and its potential to unnerve those who resist it.

Manana’s life is defined by routine. She’s a pinball in her apartment,...