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Croatia-based sales outfit Split Screen has acquired Serbian filmmaker Goran Stanković’s feature “Our Father,” ahead of its world premiere in Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery section.

Stanković’s recent TV series “Operation Sabre,” created and directed with Vladimir Tagić, was a prize winner at Canneseries. His feature documentary “In the Dark” world premiered at IDFA. Stanković, who was raised in Serbia, studied filmmaking at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where his thesis film “Way in Rye” was nominated for a Student Academy Award for best narrative short.

“Our Father,” which is Stanković’s debut narrative feature, follows 32-year-old Dejan who, after years of spiraling addiction, arrives at a secluded monastery commune run by a strict but magnetic priest. Isolated from the outside world, the commune treats addiction through labor, discipline, obedience and faith.

Assigned a humble guardian and immersed in a rigid daily routine, Dejan begins a...

1999-set drama follows two young friends on the trip of a lifetime.

Slovenian writer and director Dominik Mencej premiered Riders, his feature debut, in the feature competition of this month’s Sarajevo Film Festival.

The young director, who graduated in Film and Television Directing at the University of Ljubljana, won the awards for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 2014 Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož with his short film The Springtime Sleep.

Riders follows two young friends from a small Slovenian village who, with the year 2000 rearing into view, decide to get on the road and ride their mopeds through Croatia and Slovenia.

History, memory, and female-driven stories mark some of the main themes in the six Serbian films selected for Locarno’s First Look, a pix-in-post strand that represents one of the high points of the mid-summer festival on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

The competitive showcase this year highlights an industry that has become increasingly prolific in the past decade. Thanks in large part to an uptick in government funding, which has opened the door for more international collaborations, it’s also grown in scope and ambition. “The industry itself, in terms of production power, it’s growing,” said First Look project manager Markus Duffner. More importantly, he added, young Serbian producers are “rapidly growing in terms of international industry experience.”

As part of its partnership with Locarno, Film Center Serbia selected six projects – including five documentary features – with all but one in post-production. Four of the six films are helmed by female directors.

Winners include Dusan Milic’s latest feature Darkling and Hans Lukas Hansen’s ‘docu-fantasy’ The Quest For Tonewood.

Source: Facebook/Katja Goljat, Matjaz Rust

When East Meets West 2018 prize presentation

Projects from Serbia, Norway and the Czech Republic were among the winners at the 8th edition of the When East Meets West (Wemw) co-production forum held during this week’s Trieste Film Festival.

The three-day event ended on Tuesday evening with the presentation of Cannes Producers Network Award of free accreditation for Serbian writer-director Dusan Milic’s latest feature Darkling, which he describes as “arthouse with a touch of psychological horror”, and for Norwegian documentary filmmaker Hans Lukas Hansen’s “docu-fantasy” The Quest For Tonewood about the quest for the magical wood to make the finest violins in the world.

In addition, a Hot Docs Industry Pass was awarded to award-winning Serbian documentary filmmaker Srdjan Sarenac for his new project Prison Beauty Contest, which follows the staging...