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Hosts of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Search and Transporter 3 set to add rebates; Ukraine to join Creative Europe framework.

Georgia and Ukraine are set to become the latest countries to introduce tax incentives in order to attract foreign productions to shoot in their locations.

Speaking at this week’s Film Industry Office forum in Odessa, David Vashadze, head of export and distribution at the Georgian National Film Center (Gnfc), revealed that a tax rebate scheme will be launched from next January.

Foreign producers wishing to benefit from the scheme will be required to reach a minimum of spend of $300,000 in Georgia and fulfil a minimum of three days of shooting in the country.

The minimum spend will be reduced to $150,000 for documentary projects.

The rebate would be 20% of the qualifying expenses and an additional 2% could be paid if there are more Georgian elements such as the hiring of local cast or the promotion of Georgian culture...

Exclusive: French sales company also set to launch new films by Leconte and Delpy at Afm.

Wild Bunch has picked up sales on controversial Russia director Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambitious period drama Sunstroke,which it will launch internationally at the Afm.

“It’s a big budget, epic love story as only Mikhalkov knows how to deliver set just as the Russian revolution gains pace and the old Imperial era is destroyed forever,” said Wild Bunch sales chief Vincent Maraval.

The film revolves around a Tsarist soldier, awaiting his fate in a Bolsheviks-run prison camp, who recalls a short, passionate affair he once had with a beautiful and enigmatic married woman.

It is an adaptation of a 1927 novel by celebrated Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Ivan Bunin, written while he was living in exile in Paris.

Sunstroke was released in Russia at the beginning of October, after controversial premieres in the contested Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol in September...

A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.

The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.

Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.

Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...

A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.

The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.

Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.

Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...

The Russian distribution sector is gaining a new player with the launch of Dreamteam.

Mark Lolo, who exited his post as president of the distributor-producer Central Partnership a year ago to pursue his “own projects”, is joined at the head of the new venture by another seasoned professional, Andrei Tereshok, formerly CEO of the Kronverk chain of cinemas which has screens in Russia and Ukraine.

With one release planned a month from next January, Dreamteam’s first title will be on Jan 1: Dmitri Dyachenko’s comedy Faster Than Rabbits (Bystree, chem kroliki), featuring the comedy troupe Kvartet I who also appeared in Dyachenko’s 2010 film What Men Talk About (O chyom govoryat muzhchiny), a Russian, male answer to Sex And The City.

This will be followed on Feb 13 by the world premiere of Armen Gevorgyan’s romantic comedy Unreal Love (Nerealnaya Lyubov) with Gosha Kutsenko and Marina Alexandrovna.

Amonth later it will release Gazgolder, described as “a musical...

In Paris, the latest from painter and theater artist Dmitry Krymov, is a May-December romance set in the shadow of Red October. Mikhail Baryshnikov, now a steel fox of 64, plays Nikolai, an exiled White Russian general living out his days in post-wwi Paris. Baryshnikov utters not a word in English — he speaks French and Russian, as the English translation unspools on a series of Krymov's deeply 2-D set pieces (an enormous postcard, a cutout motorcar) and Dmitry Volkov's haunting score fills the stage like a low fog. (It's performed by the cast, a multi-talented ensemble of singers, musicians, and human synthesizers.) He's wooing another Russian emigre, a waitress named Olga (the talented Anna Sinyakina), and three quarters of the story (based on a short by writer and anti Bolshevik refugee Ivan Bunin) is nothing but the mechanics of a first date — albeit one with particularly onerous political baggage.Stateless and...