23/01/2012

The second edition of the co-production forum When East Meets West closed last Friday, January 20 in Trieste with the announcement of the winners of the grants enabling free-of-charge participation in the 2012 edition of EAVE’s European Producers Workshop. They went to two documentaries: Croatia’s Diana's List and Serbia’s The Undertaker.

Although in principle, the plan was to reward only one project, the very high level of the participants led EAVE to hand out two awards. “It’s not about the best projects, because that’s difficult to say, but those that are at the ideal stage for taking part in our workshop”, said Jani Thiltges, EAVE’s new head of training.

Diana's List is produced by producer- director Dana Budisavljevic (pictured) and Milenka Cogelja for Croatia’s Hulahop. It centres on the figure of Diana Budisavljevic, a relative of the director, who saved 12,000 Serbian children during the Second World War. Meanwhile, The Undertaker is produced by Jovana Nikolic for Prababa Production and centres on Drnda, the peculiar owner of a funeral company that is deeply rooted in the Vlach community of Serbia.

At the two-day event, 18 projects were presented (to which must be added another 20 in the parallel sections Follow Up and Warm Up) and over 150 professionals from the sector were in attendance, including producers and decision-makers (distributors, sales agents, television companies, public funds). In addition to the different round tables and project presentations, more than 400 individual meetings were held.

WEMW is an event organised by the FVG Audiovisual Fund and Trieste Film Festival, in collaboration with EAVE and CEI and with backing from Eurimages. Cineuropa, media partner of the forum, will soon publish a special report on this recently closed second edition.

(Translated from Spanish)