The Czech State Cinematography Fund welcomes and supports the growing interest of Czech producers to participate in international co-productions as minority partners. Annually, the Fund allocates CZK 40 million (nearly EUR 1.5 million) to support feature, documentary and animation projects that have a minority Czech share in the total film budget.
The results of the last call were announced in September. From 18 submissions the Fund chose nine – to be supported with a total of CZK 20 million (EUR 738,342). Among the coproduction partners are Argentina, Romania, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia and France.
In making its choice, the Fund’s Council took in account the artistic quality of the individual projects, their international potential, the current state of financing, and benefits that a co-production could bring to the Czech film industry, including the participation of domestic filmmakers and companies in a project and the usage of Czech locations.
There are several documentaries among the supported projects, among them an Argentine-French-Czech co-production, Fugue by Artemio Benki. This Prague-based French filmmaker already has experience as a Czech minority co-producer, having participated in internationally successful titles including Marguerite by Xavier Giannoli and Personal Shopper by Olivier Assayas, which was a part of the Cannes 2016 competition. Both films were shot in Prague. This time, Artemio Benki will not only produce but also direct. Fugue follows the young Argentinean pianist and composer Martin P., who is interned at the psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. He believes a new composition that he is working on will help him to find a way out of his situation, despite the fact that his passion for music was among the main factors that landed him inside the walls of Borda hospital.
Meanwhile, Czech Pink Production has become the sixth co-production partner of an interesting Romanian feature debut project called Touch Me Not, written and directed by Romanian filmmaker and visual artist Adina Pintilie. Produced by Romania’s Manekino Film, the project attracted several important co-producers, including France’s Les Films De L’Etranger, Germany’s Rohfilm, Romania’s 4 Proof Film and Bulgaria’s Agitprop. The project already has an impressive history: having gone through development at Italy’s Torino Lab and the Cannes Cinefondation Atelier, the project also was in this year’s Venice Gap-Financing Market, won the Binger Lab Award, and took home the Cinelink Post Republic Award at the Sarajevo Festival. Touch Me Not, a mixture of reality and fiction, recounts a voyeur woman and two men’s search for – and fear of – intimacy. It stars Tomas Lemarquis (X-Men: Apocalypse) and U.K. actress Laura Benson (Crime Is Our Business).
Maur Film, recently the minority co-producer of a short animation Superbia by Lucy Tóth, which was selected for Semaine de la Critique in Cannes, applied for support for the animated short The Missing Star, written and directed by Loic Malo and produced by France’s Lardux Films. The Missing Star deals with the phenomenon of Stalin, depicting the last moments of craziness of this lonely tyrant. The film presents an original view of a personality who strongly influenced modern history. The original technology, combining various genres and techniques, is one of its strengths.
D for Division, directed by Davis Simanis and produced by Ego Media, is another supported documentary project. The majority-Latvian documentary essay on the border between Russia and Latvia is at the same time a report on the border between East and West. The authors based the film on the history of the area, which witnessed some of the cruellest episodes of the 20th century. The film is highly topical for the entire European space. Radim Procházka Production is the Czech minority co-producer.
Other supported projects include the Slovak-Czech Nina, by Slovak filmmaker Juraj Lehotský, a social drama with a strong element of authenticity, produced by Punkchart Films on the Slovak side and by Endorfilm on the Czech side; Endorfilm also co-produces the documentary The Cars We Drove into Capitalism by Bulgarian filmmakers Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, which examines the symbols of the Socialist automobile industry; 8Heads Production co-produces the psychological drama Basement by Russian filmmaker Igor Voloshin; Master Film is the Czech minority co-producer of the Croatian adventure/family film My Grandpa is an Alien, to be directed by Dražen Žarković and Marina Andree Škop, and Little Moscow, a new project of Grímur Hákonarson (a FAMU graduate) known for his feature film Rams.