27/11/2014 - The third and final day of the TurinFilmLab Meeting Event made room for trans-media works and for the 9 FrameWork project Production Awards candidates

We left him at the 2013 Rome Independent Film Festival, where with his debut feature Aquadro [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], a story of sex, love and social media between two teens, he had earned the award for Best Italian Feature Film (read the review). We meet Stefano Lodovichi once again at the7th TurinFilmLab Meeting Event (24-26 November) with a new project that’s vast, futuristic and international: Polaris. Created by the director together with screenwriters Davide Orsini (co-creator of Aquadro) and Isabella Aguilar, Polaris is a project that includes film, graphic novel, videogame and web series, and was thus screened as part of the TFL Writers' Room, the Turin lab project reserved for trans-media works. Producing the movie is Tommaso Arrighi’s Mood Film with Rai Cinema, which had previously backed the director in his first film.

We’re in the year 2020, a freezing-cold wind begins to blow on Earth; people struggle to survive the cold. Different groups of survivors travel to find warmer places where they can build a new civilisation. Children of the Ice will be the first film in the trilogy: “The entire project is a road movie that starts in Northern Europe and has as its goal the heart of Africa”, explained Lodovichi, “various communities of survivors will merge on this long journey: we’ll have Scandinavians, French, Italians and British... The movie will be in English, we’re considering having an international cast. The idea is to find lots of co-productions, at the moment we’ve already been joined by the Germans of Weydemann Bros.”

The target group for the project, in its development phase thanks also to the support of BLS Südtirol Alto Adige, is the young adult category (13-21 years). But where does the idea for this cold saga come from? “We asked ourselves what the possible climate outcomes could be on earth”, said the director, “so we worked with a climatologist who has his own theory against global warming, a theory that has been gaining ground in the last year. The most recent reports tell us that next winter in Central Europe will be arctic. Let’s hope that our plot doesn’t become a reality, but it’s an issue that we think could take root in the minds of viewers”. Filming will commence at the beginning of 2016.

Among other Writers' Room projects looking for partners presented in the third and final day of the TFL Meeting Event (where space was also given to the 9 FrameWork project Production Award candidates – find them here), worth noting is a Swedish animation TV series, Krabstadt (a Monkey Machine Film production) by video artists Ewa Einhorn and Jeuno JE Kim: a kind of South Park set in an small arctic town where every Nordic country sends its “unwanted”, starring two female Development Office employees. It’s wry, imaginative and extremely enjoyable.

(Translated from Italian)