Vincek (19) is paralysed by both his stagnant youth and a cosmic threat that leaves the whole world searching for answers. Persuaded by his friend, he decides to leave the smouldering-hot city and heads for a cottage where his friends are sheltered for the summer. What should have been an easy ride turns into a condensed initiation process. He encounters both violence and kindness and is subject to a variety of uncomfortable tests. Will he submit to the present moment and let his numbness crack under the pressure of uncontrolled existence?
Albert Hospodářský was born in 1996 in Jihlava, student of FAMU in Prague, Department of Documentary Film. During his studies, he realized he was interested in both documentary and fiction filmmaking and that he would like to pursue both genres. Over the last three years, he has made several short films, both documentary and fiction. One of them, Nekyia: An Inner Portrait of the Poet Hradecky competed at Ji.hlava IDFF 2019. In addition to filming, he also writes short stories and film scripts. He is currently working on a script for a new feature film in addition to the feature length Brutal Heat project.
Ondřej Lukeš is finishing his bachelor studies at FAMU in Prague. He featured as a production manager on films such as Anatomy of a Czech Afternoon (Czech Lion award) or Nekyia (IDFF Ji.hlava competition). Apart from Brutal Heat, he is now working on two feature documentaries as a producer – Such a Strange Winter and What Weighs You Down, Dear Boy?
Lukáš Kokeš studied at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts and graduated from the Department of Documentary Film at FAMU in Prague. With Klára Tasovská, he co-directed the feature debut Fortress (2012, Best Czech Documentary at IDFF Jihlava 2012, LUX Prize 2013 nominee) and Nothing Like Before (2017, world premiere at IDFA 2017 First Appearance).
The main character of the film, Vincek, hasn’t found the courage to start living yet. But thanks to technology, he can be anyone, anywhere in the world, and that’s why he lacks the motivation to fight for his individuality. In the modern world, we no longer have to battle external problems. We fight what’s inside - unsatisfied, untameable and unseen by everyone around us.
The film aims to reflect the weight and responsibility of a young person’s life. Everything is in reach, close – and all the harder it is to decide who we are, where we’re headed, and what makes sense. The world we live in belongs solely to us, and we must submit to the present moment if we wish to find happiness.
nutprodukce
Píseckého 333/15, 150 00, Praha 5, Czech Republic
Email: [email protected]
Punkchart films
Špitálská 20, 81108, Bratislava, Slovakia
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +421 915 606 088
Albert Hospodářský | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 731 753 629
Ondřej Lukeš | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 733 285 088
Lukáš Kokeš | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 606 606 830
Bartek (22) runs a small horse farm in the mountains in Southern Poland. He had to become head of the family when his father left, and his mother had a breakdown. One day their neighbour dies, and his son Dawid (32) comes to the village for the funeral. Bartek becomes fascinated by Dawid and his recklessness. First love will force him to decide if he’s ready to choose his freedom over family obligations.
Kamil Krawczycki was born in 1990 in Zakopane. He graduated from Warsaw Film School and Wajda School. He directed two short films - The End of My World (Best Short Film at AMOR Festival in Chile and Best Actor Award at Las Vegas Film Festival), The Last One (Presented at Barcelona Short Film Festival and Liverpool Film Festival) and several music videos. Elephant is his debut feature film. In his films, he wants to focus on characters who are often marginalized by society in Poland.
Co‑founder and CEO of Tongariro Releasing, a distribution company in Poland focusing on LGBT+ films. Elephant is his first film as a producer and the first production for Tongariro.
In my film, I come back to my hometown in Southern Poland, the region with the most breath-taking nature but a place that’s pretty hard to live in when you’re gay. This is the story of a young man who is forced to become head of the family when his father leaves and his mother has a breakdown. Family obligations affect his freedom, but he manages to hide his desires. I wanted to portray a character who is vulnerable and strong at the same time. I know that many queer people in Poland can relate to that. By telling this story, I wanted to pay tribute to them and give them a bit of hope, which is highly needed in Poland at the moment.
Tongariro Releasing
Wrocławska 21/18A, 61-838, Poznań, Poland
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +48 61 307 22 44
Kamil Krawczycki | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +48 889 169 111
Jakub Mróz | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +48 515 270 800
Joanna Lipiecka | PR
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +48 787 543 006
Delphine and Antoine live an affluent life with their two adopted kids, Aslan and Adia. They are preparing for Aslan’s departure to the US to study entomology, spending the last few days of his stay in the warm atmosphere of their summer villa.
Delphine receives an anonymous phone call telling her that, at the peak of a drunken night with his colleagues, Antoine mumbled something about having a relationship with one of his children. Confused, Delphine tries to get a grip on herself and quietly investigate the claim. However, as she looks closer at her husband and his relationship with their teenage daughter and son, she begins to see traces of what she can only wish to be untrue.
Kaveh Daneshmand is an Iranian filmmaker based in Prague. His first short film, Occasional Showers, has been selected as the best short film of the year by the Union of Iranian Writers and Critics. His second short film, Alula, premiered at Oberhausen International Film Festival.
Kaveh teaches film directing and Iranian cinema at Prague Film School and Charles University respectively. He is also the artistic director of ÍRÁN:CI Film Festival, which is an annual showcase of Iranian cinema in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
A self-made multi-media artist born in 1997 in Konak, Turkey, Gem Deger directed several short films and music videos in his homeland before moving to Prague, Czech Republic to develop a more subversive form of expression and work on his debut feature film Playdurizm, a provocative take on his generation’s blurred lines between reality and art and the pursuit of self-acceptance in a censorious society.
Playdurizm had a strong international reception and competed at reputable film festivals such as Fantaspoa International Film Festival and Molodist International Film Festival. It has also been released in North America under the Kino Lorber banner.
Endless Summer Syndrome reflects on sensitive topics such as adoption, immigration, sexual identity and incest in the context of a modern and open-minded family whose integrity is threatened by an inconvenient phone call.
A portrait of a seemingly ideal, loving and multicultural family and its collapse, the story questions family bonds from a much-avoided point of view and pushes its characters to an irreversible edge, where they’re forced to question all the decisions they’ve made to be where they are today.
Kaveh Daneshmand | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 774 632 379
Gem Deger | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 608 313 083
Fatma and her two daughters, Najah and Waffa, are "machtat", wedding musicians in Mahdia, a small city in Tunisia. The sisters follow opposite paths: while Najah, divorced, tries to remarry to escape the authority of her brothers, Waffa wishes to divorce her violent husband. Fatma navigates between the two, praying that things will one day get better.
Sonia Ben Slama is a Tunisian-French documentary filmmaker.
She grew up in Paris, where she studied Art and Cinema at University Paris 3-Sorbonne-Nouvelle. In 2015, she directed her first feature documentary Maktoub, produced by Les films de la Caravane (Djerba Doc Days - Grand Jury Prize, Zagora Film FesRval - Special distinction from jury, AFIDOK - Grand Jury Price). She’s currently working on two feature documentaries, Machtat (Chicken&Egg Pictures Lab 2020, MFI Script2Film Workshops Project Development Award from Visions du Réel) and 316 North Main Street (in development).
After her filmmaking and psychology studies in Beirut, Tania El Khoury moved to Paris and joined the Parisian independent production company Moby Dick Films, which she worked with as legal and financial manager until 2019.
In 2017, she founded the production company Khamsin Films in Beirut, and in 2020 she founded the Paris-based production company Les Films de l’Altaï. She recently produced the latest feature fiction by acclaimed filmmaker Ghassan Salhab, The River (International Competition, Locarno 2021). Her current projects include Sonia Ben Slama’s newest feature documentary Machtat and Anas Khalaf’s new feature film Love-45.
She is the recipient of the Netflix Fund for Creative Equity x AFAC in 2022 as a producer for the project Manity by Hussen Ibraheem.
I grew up between France and Tunisia, and I often think that I probably would have had a similar life as the film’s characters if my father did not choose to emigrate. I could have been one of the many women under the authority of an entire society. This is surely the reason why hidden women have always fascinated me, beginning with my grandmother, who got married very young. This story was the starrting point of my previous film, Maktoub.
With Machtat, I keep digging: why are strong women caught between their will of empowerment and an overwhelming tradition? Why do they want to be free and at the same time expect their daughters to marry and live the same lives as them?
Khamsin Films
Immeuble Victor El Khoury, rue Zouk Al Kharab, Dbayeh, Beirut, Lebanon
Email: [email protected]
Sonia Ben Slama | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +33 674 633 612
Tania El Khoury | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +33 620 426 005
What does it mean to be a stranger in your own home and country?
Part of Society is an intimate journey into the world and mind of a transgender woman, Adelina, who has been locked away from the outside world for 11 years. Finally, her dream comes true, as Adelina flees Georgia and finds her freedom in Europe. Despite her inner fears, she finally finds a job, participates in the Miss Trans beauty contest and pursues her aspiration of becoming a dancer. However, the COVID-19 pandemic crushes all her dreams. Soon after, her life takes an unexpected turn. Events begin to spiral out of control and alter her life forever.
Rati Tsiteladze is a European Film Academy Award nominated filmmaker. He is an alumnus of TIFF Filmmaker Lab, Locarno Academy, IDFAcademy, Berlinale Talent Project Market and Cannes Cinéfondation.
Rati has directed and produced several short films that have won over 50 awards worldwide and screened at more than 300 festivals, including Hong Kong, Melbourne and Locarno. His recent work Prisoner of Society (2018) won numerous Oscar qualifying awards and was nominated for the European Film Academy. With his feature film project Blue Nights, he was selected at Cannes Cinéfondation Residence and won the Eurimages Award at TIFF and the first HFPA Film Independent Award by the Golden Globes.
Olga Slusareva is an award-winning producer from Georgia. Since 2014, she has been working with ArtWay Film production on documentaries and art-house film projects. She has produced several short films that have been screened at more than 100 film festivals and won over 20 awards internationally, including a European Film Academy nomination. The company’s feature projects were selected at various prestigious festivals including the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence and Berlinale Co-Production Market and have won Eurimages Award at TIFF, Special Mention at Locarno and the HFPA Film Independent Award by the Golden Globes. With her recent project White Nights, she won the TDF Award at Visions du Réel.
When Adelina shared her story with me, it touched me deeply and I knew we had to tell her story no matter the consequences. Her story is not only unique, but also reflects the state of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2018, we made the short film Prisoner of Society, which was nominated for the European Film Academy Award, and the film’s success allowed us to help Adelina flee Georgia. However, over the past years, her story took an unforeseen turn and became even more complicated and complex.
For me Part of Society is a film about being yourself. To be 'different' in a society means you are faced with the choice of becoming invisible for the sake of collective harmony or fighting for who you are, even if it costs you your own life.
ArtWay Film
109 Giorgi Chkondideli St, 0180, Tbilisi, Georgia
Email: [email protected]
Rati Tsiteladze | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +995 599 992 277
Olga Slusareva | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +995 558 643 168
Self-portrait along the Borderline is a documentary about the obsession with identity and home. An abandoned house turns out to be a trap and a revelation; a “rite of passage” that opens the door to revisit the past. Fragments create a personal and political biography. The film searches for lost and split identity using both archive material and recent footage from the unrecognized territory on the border of the Black Sea - Abkhazia.
The film touches on the complexity of nationalism and identity in times of war and global displacement through a personal story of a divided family. It is a story that also reflects recent history and becomes a manual of what comes next once the wars are over.
Anna Dziapshipa is a director and producer. She is a producer of Salome Jashi’s first documentary Bakhmaro and, together with her, is a co-founder and director of the documentary film company Sakdoc Film. The last fiction film of Aleksandre Koberidze What We See When We Look at the Sky that she co-produced was part of the main competition of the Berlin International Film Festival (FIPRESCI award) and had its theatrical release in USA, Germany, France, etc. She is also the author of several short films such as The Hunter Erects the City (2018) 7’, Dear Dirty Tbilisi (2016) 11’ On Being Dziapshipa (2018) 8’ A House Left in a Dream (2021) 8’ etc. Her short films often explore the transformation of physical borders into memory and identity.
Sakdoc is a well-established documentary film production company and organization aiming to promote documentary film making in Georgia.
Salomé Jashi and Anna Dziapshipa founded a documentary film production company in 2008. The company produces and co-produces documentaries and short and long fiction for local and international audiences. Its track record includes Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky (2021) Competition of 71st Berlin International Film Festival, Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden (2021) premiered at Sundance Film Festival, The Dazzling Light of Sunset (2016) and Bakhmaro (2011) awarded at DOK Leipzig and Jihlava, both co-produced with MDR/Arte as well as Ugis Olte’s Double Aliens (2015), which premiered at IDFA.
Combining voice, archive and recent footage, the film searches for lost and split identity stuck between the border of Georgia and Abkhazia. Here the fragments are intricately woven together to create a personal and political biography, recalling the complicated and controversial historical past of the Georgian-Abkhaz relationship. Upon the finding of an abandoned summer house in Abkhazia, the space becomes a ‘Pandora’s box’ 25 years later, making it possible to revisit violent yet pleasant memories.
Sakdoc Film
24g Khazbegi Ave., 0160, Tbilisi, Georgia
Email: [email protected]
Anna Dziapshipa | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +995 577 443 272
The story of Ahmed, Isra'a and their three children in Aden, Yemen, 2019. Both parents lose their jobs and suffer from the economic crisis. The movie starts with Isra’a finding out about her pregnancy at a time when they cannot cover the expenses of a new child, leading them to make difficult decisions in order to survive.
Amr Gamal (b.1983, Poland) is a Yemeni film and theatre director. In 2001, he received the President's Award in theatre-script writing, becoming the youngest Yemeni ever to win this award. In spring 2018, he wrote/directed/produced his first feature film 10 Days Before the Wedding, which premiered in Aden during the summer, becoming the first film to open commercially in Yemen in the last three decades. The film continued to be screened for over eight months and became Yemen's official submission to the Oscars in 2018. The film won the Jury Prize at Aswan International Women’s Film Festival, Best Makeup and Hairstyle, Best Costume Design at Jaipur International Film Festival, Audience Choice Award at San Diego Arab Film Festival, and Best Screenplay at Casablanca Arab Film Festival.
Mohsen Alkhalifi (b. 1993, Aden) is a Yemeni-American producer and TV presenter. After becoming one of the first Yemeni influencers on YouTube in 2012, he began his professional career as a TV presenter with a well-known Yemeni TV channel in 2016. Since then, he has presented and produced hundreds of episodes that have gained him recognition in the media scene. In 2018, he collaborated with his friend Amr Gamal to create the first Yemeni commercial movie to be shown in theatres, 10 Days Before the Wedding (Yemen's official submission to the 91st Oscars 2018). The film was met with incredible public acclaim, consequently opening the door to the movie-making industry in Yemen.
The idea of the movie The Burdened was sparked by a WhatsApp message. I was in Abu Dhabi airport on my way to New Orleans, Louisiana to attend a special screening of my first feature, 10 Days Before the Wedding. Minutes before I boarded the plane, I received a message on WhatsApp from my close friend, Nasser, in which he apologized for not responding to my messages during the past weeks. He then sent me a voice message – with a heavy heart and broken voice, he told me that his wife was now pregnant with their fourth child. This news was devastating to them, as they could barely feed and raise their already existing three children, especially because their situation had gone downhill after being laid-off from their jobs at Aden Channel.
Adenium Productions
Mualla St, Aden, Yemen
Email: [email protected]
Station Films
Khartoom, Sudan
Email: [email protected]
Mohsen Alkhalifi | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +971 588 317 217
Amr Gamal | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +971 588 317 217
This film reflects people's desire to be happy in a rapidly changing world, even when that world is shattering like the spring ice. The Ice That Still Supports Us is about the ice road that erases borders between people. The ice road is a path between social reconciliation and intolerance. According to an old tradition, the ice road is built every year for cars and pedestrians. But the ice road is like a ghost road – no one knows when and where it will appear.
Arko Okk is an Estonian filmmaker, born in 1967 in Tallinn, Estonia. He graduated from the VGIK, Moscow Film Institute, Department of Cinematography, master A. Knyazhinskiy(Stalker, 1979); The Ice That Still Supports Us (2022), 63 min, documentary, director and producer; Allan, A Man at the Age of Christ (2014), 52 min, documentary, director and producer; Hope 3D (2011), 19 min, 3D short feature debut, director and producer; Best Director at Bishkek Short Film Festival 2011; Man Who Lived in Three-Dimensional Time (2011), 65 min, 3D documentary, director and producer; The End of Poetry (2009) 114 min, documentary, director and producer; The Highway Crossing (1999), 68 min, feature debut as a director and producer; FIPRESCI prize at the 10th Stockholm IFF, Sweden; Best Opera Prima Prize at the 18th Uruguay IFF.
Arko Okk is an Estonian producer. Awarded films: The Highway Crossing (1999), 68 min, producer. FIPRESCI prize for the best film in the section “Northern Light” at the 10th Stockholm IFF, Sweden, 1999. Best Opera Prima prize at the 18th Uruguay IFF, 2000; The Bus (2004) by Laila Pakalniņa (Co-Production: Est-Lat-Lit-Fin), producer. Best Baltic Film & Best Baltic Documentary Award at Riga IFF, 2004.
I'm interested in people and atmosphere. I started this film from scratch, knowing as much about the ice road or the frozen ocean as did Pytheas, a Greek geographer 2300 years ago when he visited Ultima Thule. Therefore, this film is an observation through the eyes of Pytheas 2300 years later.
ACUBA FILM
Tartu mnt 80, 10112, Tallinn, Estonia
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +37 256 646 725
Ketvirta versija
Revonių 8-2, 03154, Vilnius, Lithuania
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +37 061 807 994
Arko Okk | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +37 256 646 725
Sandra Heidov | Producer, Editor-in-chief
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +37 256 914 411
A young anthropologist, Zdenka, moves with her husband and three sons to Svalbard, Norway, to study how life is changing in polar regions. She has received a prestigious two-year grant to carry out extensive research on the impact of globalisation on the inhabitants of the world’s northernmost town, Longyearbyen. After falling in love with her new home, Zdenka discovers that icebergs and permafrost aren’t the only things vanishing in the Arctic.
By conducting interviews with residents, she begins to perceive how heterogeneous the small local community actually is while revealing tensions that lie beneath the surface. Zdenka then has to weigh up her involvement in the local community, which she originally only intended to observe.
Veronika earned her degree in cultural studies at Charles University and screenwriting and dramaturgy at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She has been working as a film director, documentary script editor and curator. Her feature-length debut Daniel’s World premiered at Berlinale in 2015. For several years, Veronika was the head of the Ex Oriente Film workshop at the Institute of Documentary Film and worked as a curator and acquisition manager at DAFilms. Currently, she is cooperating with various film training programs and markets as a consultant and selector; she is preparing her fiction debut and is about to complete her second feature documentary The Visitors.
Kristýna graduated from the department of production at FAMU. In 2015, she produced her graduate film Road-Movie, which had its world premiere at Black Nights Film Festival.
In 2016, she founded her own production company Cinémotif Films, focusing on arthouse co-productions. She produced a documentary The Sound is Innocent, which premiered at Visions du Réel 2019. The feature fiction Lost in Paradise was the first ever co-production between the Czech Republic and Switzerland and premiered in 2021 at Solothurn FF. She is finishing a documentary from Svalbard The Visitors and a feature debut Arved, both of which are now in post-production. Among others, she is currently developing the feature debut Year of the Widow. She is a EURODOC 2017 graduate and has attended industry platforms such as Ex Oriente, East Doc Platform, MFI and others.
When I decided to follow Zdenka during her fieldwork in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, I expected our main filming location to be of incredible beauty and fragility. However, I didn’t anticipate that this place would also be a microcosm that is so intensely embracing some of the most universal issues and pursuits of today. My more than two-year-long documentary journey with Zdenka and her family then resulted in a very personal, cinematic diary covering the themes that emerge in this unique location, with a focus on issues relating to the social integrity and sustainability of the local community, the danger of exclusionary practices, and especially the universal need for a stable and predictable home.
Cinémotif Films
Šumavská 13, 120 00, Prague 2, Czech Republic
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420731203715
The Thousand Images
Løeshagaveien 49, 1459, Nesodden, Norway
Peter Kerekes Film
Vištuk 277, 90085, Vištuk, Slovakia
Email: [email protected]
Veronika Lišková | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 777 169 680
Kristýna Michálek Květová | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +420 731 203 715
Kaloyan returns to Bulgaria for a few days to sell the empty family apartment after living in Spain with his mother for the last 10 years. There is a big investment project going on related to the construction of a casino, hotel and golf course in the desolated town of Kaloyan’s childhood. Many of the old buildings must be demolished, while the cemetery gets moved to a different location to free up space for the golf course. Although Kaloyan and his deceased father never managed to get along and lost touch a long time ago, the young boy must arrange the transfer of his father’s remains. The process starts as a mundane task, but soon transcends into a journey of self-discovery that tracks the connection between childhood trauma, memory and the passage of time.
Pavel G. Vesnakov is a writer-director. His filmography includes the short movies Trains (2011), The Paraffin Princess (2012) and Pride (2013). They have been shown at a number of international film festivals such as Clermont Ferrand and Locarno. He has received many prestigious awards, including the Grand Prix for Best Film at the Clermont Ferrand Festival and Nomination for EFA. With his short film project Zeus, Pavel won the Robert Bosch Foundation's Grand Prize.
Pavel has also participated in Berlinale Talents and Sarajevo Talents. Pavel’s first feature film German Lessons premiered at the Cairo International Film Festival and won the award for Best Male Performance.
Veselka Kiryakova graduated from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she studied Film Editing. She produced Ága (2018), the second movie by director Milko Lazarov, produced by Veselka Kiryakova, which premiered at the competition during Berlinale 2018 and won more than 40 awards around the world, such as the Grand Prix in Tehran, Cabourg, Chukotka, Heart of Sarajevo, etc. She is working with Greek directors Elina Psykou and Yorgos Zois as minority co-producer. Veselka was part of the Producers on the Move at Cannes in 2018. She participated in the EAVE workshop 2020. She is a member of EFA.
As Louise Gluck writes: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
This is exactly the situation my main character Kaloyan tries to come to terms with when he comes home to sell the apartment of his recently deceased father. The question of how time passes and what the word time means has bothered me since my childhood. How do we remember things? Do we remember the objects or the emotions? Do we remember the voices of our deceased relatives, or do we only recall their faces? These are all questions that I try to mediate on through the journey of my main character. With this movie, I am trying to explore the stillness of memory and the muteness of hidden childhood trauma.
Red Carpet
Selishteto 16, 1000, Sofia, Bulgaria
Email: [email protected]
Pavel G. Vesnakov | Director
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +359 878 889 283
Veselka Kiryakova | Producer
Email: [email protected]
Mobile: +359 898 610 764
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