After the conclusion of the selection committee’s decision-making session held at the end of February, the Film Fund Luxembourg has publically announced the recipients of its latest slate of funding, accounting for a total of €6,672,030 in production and development grants. The selection committee evaluated 25 applications in total, with requested assistance amounting to over €19.5 million.

This time around, development grants have been assigned to four features, namely Blies Brothers’ Shock the Monkey (€60,000), a virtual reality animated film produced by a_BAHN, Chris Poulles' documentary On the Edge of Tourism (€120,000), penned by Jacques Schmitz and produced by Amour Fou Luxembourg, Jeff Desom’s directorial debut Es sieth dich (€20,000, produced by Samsa Film) and Adolf El Assal and Dennis Foon’s fiction film Hooped (€20,000), a Wady Films production.

A total of €6,452,030 has been earmarked for the production of nine projects, and in particular, six features, two shorts and one animated series. The two shorts in receipt of a grant are Nicolas Neuhold’s Faleminderit (€129,949), produced by Calach Films, and Laurent Prim’s Lupus (€130,000), produced by Skill Lab. The only animated TV series to receive production support is Sarah Sutter and Frédéric Wedeux’s Nächst Statioun Staffel 1 (€1,125,000), produced by Zeilt Productions and penned by a team of writers including Laurent Witz, Hervé Benedetti, Nicolas Robin, Cyril Bossmann, Pascal Stervinou, Fanny Meeschaert and Chérif Saïs.

With regard to feature film funding, the largest grant went to Arne Toonen’s Playboy Priest (€1,200,000), produced by Samsa Film, Ciné Cri De Coeur (Belgium), Rinkel Film (Netherlands) and Hazazah Pictures (Netherlands). The story, written by Thomas van der Ree (best known for contributing to the script of the 2019 Dutch Oscars bid The Resistance Banker [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]), Joost Reijmers, Michel Sluysmans and Jan Eilander, is set in the 1970s and revolves around a controversial Venray-born priest called Joep Haffmans, whose life is divided between Sunday Mass, a brothel and a bar. The other two fiction films to receive funding are Ruth Olshan’s children’s film Raspberries with Mustard [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (€1,142,081, produced by Amour Fou Luxembourg and Germany’s Zischlermann Filmproduktion) and Stephan Streker’s fourth feature The Enemy [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Stephan Streker
scheda film] (€1,050,000, produced by Bac Cinema).

Finally, two documentary features will receive production support, namely Karolina Markiewicz’s The Living Witnesses [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Karolina Markiewicz e Pasc…
scheda film] (€280,000), produced by Paul Thiltges Distributions, and Pol Cruchten’s Visage(s) d’Afrique (€200,000), produced by Red Lion, while the only awarded animated feature film to receive support is Sepideh Farsi’s The Siren [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (€1,195,000), set in Iran’s oil capital Abadan in 1980 and penned by Djavad Djavahery. The latter is being co-produced by Bac Cinema, Lunanime (Belgium) and Les Films d’Ici (France).