15/04/2008

Riina Sildos, the Estonian producer of Ilmar Raag’s second feature film, One More Croissant, selected at Cannes L’Atelier du festival 2008, will be co-producing the project with Milena Poylo from France’s TS Production.

The €2m project is written by Raag, based on personal memories told by his own mother. It is the story of a 50-year-old woman from Estonia who is asked to take care of an aging suicidal French lady of Estonian origin,” explains Sildos. “Both women are confined to a small Parisian apartment, and a strong human bond develops between them.”

The film will be shot in Estonian and French, in both co-production countries, starting January 2009. Public institutions involved in the project include the MEDIA Programme, the Estonian Film Foundation and Estonia’s Cultural Endowment.

Raag’s previous film, the youth drama The Class [+see also:
trailer
film profile], won many international awards including Best Film at last Sunday’s closing ceremony of Stockholm’s Children and Youth Film Festival.

Another youth drama written by Raag and produced by Sildos will be ready in May: I Was Here: First Arrest, by established filmmaker Rene Vibre (Mat the Cat). Sildos, who was Estonia’s 2007 Producer on the Move, describes the film as a “coming-of-age story about a 17-year-old boy from an elite school who becomes a drug dealer in order to survive, until things get out of control”.

The film is co-produced with Finland’s Helsinki Filmi. The theatrical release in Estonia and in Finland is set for September 2008.

Sildos is involved in another European co-production, the documentary Snow on Krasnaja Poljana, to be directed by Susanna Brandstätter (Rule of Law) for Austria’s Mischief Film. The project focuses on one of the biggest resorts with subtropical climate in Russia, Sochi, where the Winter Olympics will take place in 2014. However, small villages in the neighborhood are already being threatened by the major construction work undertaken by Austrian contractors.