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Lithuanian writer-director Eglė Vertelytė’s Tasty was named the winner of Screen International’s best pitch award.

The 2020 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has named the winners of its Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event awards.

The industry showcase was held online this year, with the winners announced yesterday (November 26) following a week of online presentations and networking with around 850 delegates.

Lithuanian writer-director Eglė Vertelytė’s second feature film Tasty was named the winner of Screen International’s best pitch award, which guarantees coverage on Screen throughout the project’s lifecycle, at the Baltic Event Co-Production Market.

The €700,000 comedy focuses on two...

Russian filmmakers Alexander Sokurov and Alexey Fedorchenko are among the latest to speak out in public in support of their Ukrainian colleague Oleg Sentsov.

“The story about Sentsov’s arrest appeared from the very beginning to be rather fantastic,” Sokurov said in a statement for the Russian discussion forum Snob.

“The investigating organs have somewhat exaggerated the ability of film directors for criminal political activities.”

The director, whose latest film Francofonia will have its world premiere in Venice next month, said he was “confident” that there wasn’t any extremism in Sentsov’s actions and “nothing more extremist than civil protest”.

Meanwhile, Alexey Fedorchenko (Angels of the Revolution) declared that “protecting the freedom of innocently accused people is not something that only filmmakers must do, but all the inhabitants of our country”.

Alexey German Jr, whose last feature Under Electric Clouds screened at the Berlinale in February, described what was now happening to Oleg Sentsov as “a...

Veteran Bulgarian actor Ivaylo Hristov’s third feature film as director, the coming-of-age tale Losers, won the Golden St. George Prize for best film on Friday at the 37th edition of the Moscow International Film Festival (Miff), which ran from June 19-26.

Jury president Jean-Jacques Annaud said that Hristov’s film was “a movie we liked in all aspects – the cinematography [by Emil Hristov], the actors and the direction. We came to an agreement very quickly.”

Produced by Profilm, Losers, which had its world premiere in Moscow, centres on four high school friends in a small provincial town whose lives are changed forever by a visiting rock band.

Hristov’s film also won the Russian Film Critics Prize and the award from the jury of the Federation of Russian Film Clubs

Looking back on the week, Annaud said that the jury’s deliberations had been “a very easy conversation” and spoke warmly of “an extraordinarily friendly jury” whose members included...

Russian culture secretary calls collaboration “frozen” as industries strive to continue cross-border production.

The ongoing political tension between Russia and Ukraine was not forgotten during this week’s Moscow International Film Festival (Miff), which ends tomorrow (Friday).

At a meeting with representatives of two new Russian films Battle for Sevastopol and The Territory, Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky described collaboration between the Russian and Ukrainian film industries as currently being ¨frozen¨.

Signs of the instability were evident in the nationalities of some titles at the festival, including Sergey Mokritskiy’s Russian box office success Battle for Sevastopol [$8m (Rub 435m) since April 2], which had initially been made as a Russian-Ukrainian co-production.

The International Competition included world premieres of Alexander Mindadze’s Russian-uk-German co-production My Good Hans, which was largely shot on location in Ukraine’s Nikopol and had originally had a Ukrainian co-producer on board.

Other films to have shot in Ukraine and screen at the festival included Andrey Proshkin’s Orleans...

The film industries of Finland and Austria will be under the spotlight at the 7th Moscow Business Square (Mbs) (June 21-22).

Producers, distributors and film funders from both countries will be travelling to Moscow to meet their opposite numbers from the Russian film community.

As in previous years, the industry programme of the Moscow International Film Festival (Miff) will include public pitchings of feature film and documentary projects looking for potential co-production partners in the Co-Production Forum.

Past editions of Mbs featured such projects as Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Pavel Lungin’s Queen Of Spades, Maria Saakyan’s I’m Going To Change My Name and Bakur Bakuradze’sThe Hunter, Tatiana Korol’s Passing Clouds, and Marat Alykulov’s Lenin?!

In addition, the two-day event will include masterclasses and roundtables on alternative financing and distribution strategies for independent films.

Moscow’s main competition

Veteran French director Jean-Jacques Annaud will head the international jury at the...

Redmayne lauded for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Belgian director Gust van den Berghe’s Lucifer was presented with the Grand Prix – including a €10,000 grant from the City of Tallinn - at the 18th edition of the Black Nights Film Festival (Nov 14-30) at the weekend.

This is the first year that Tallinn’s International Competition was held with Black Nights now operating as a Fiapf-designated non-specialised competitive festival.

Van den Berghe’s third feature had its world premiere in Rome’s Cinema d’Oggi competition at the Rome Film Festival in October and is being handled internationally by the Paris/Mexico-based sales company Ndm.

The International Jury including Finnish actress Kati Outinen and film-makers Andrei Proshkin (Russia) and Tomasz Wasilewski (Poland) awarded the prize for Best Cinematographer to Erik Põllumaa for his work on Estonian film-maker Martti Helde’s In The Crosswind and for Best Director to Kyrgyzstan’s Marat Sarulu for Move...

Other prizes included a Best Actor prize for Eddie Redmayne for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Belgian director Gust van den Berghe’s Lucifer was presented with the Grand Prix – including a €10,000 grant from the City of Tallinn - at the 18th edition of the Black Nights Film Festival (Nov 14-30) at the weekend.

This is the first year that Tallinn’s International Competition was held with Black Nights now operating as a Fiapf-designated non-specialised competitive festival.

Van den Berghe’s third feature had its world premiere in Rome’s Cinema d’Oggi competition at the Rome Film Festival in October and is being handled internationally by the Paris/Mexico-based sales company Ndm.

The International Jury including Finnish actress Kati Outinen and film-makers Andrei Proshkin (Russia) and Tomasz Wasilewski (Poland) awarded the prize for Best Cinematographer to Erik Põllumaa for his work on Estonian film-maker Martti Helde’s In The Crosswind and for...

Award-winning director fears six months of work on Yuri Arabov-scripted movie may have been wasted

Russian film-makers have been forced to halt production on a new movie due to the political turmoil in Crimea.

In comments first noted by the Hollywood Reporter, award-winning director Andrei Proshkin said on his Facebook page that production on the film Orlean had been halted with immediate effect. The feature, written by Yuri Arabov, the winner of the prize for best screenplay at the 1999 Cannes film festival, had been due to shoot in the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula but is now shrouded in uncertainty.

"Six months of pre-production, selection of locations, preliminary work on location in February, when there were still no signs that the current events in Crimea could occur – all that went down the drain," complained Proshkin, who won best director at the Moscow film festival for his previous film Orda (The...

The fifth edition of the Bengaluru International Film Festival will hold retrospectives of Girish Kasaravalli and Jahnu Barua among others. Five of Kasaravalli’s films: Tabarana Kathe (1986), Kraurya (1996), Thaayi Saheba (1997), Dweepa (2003) and Hasina (2004)will be screened. While Barua’s Halodhia Choraye Baodhan Khai (1987), Banani (1990), Firingoti (1992) and Hkhagoroloi Bohu Door(1995) will be screened.

Besides, three other sections are dedicated to Indian cinema. Chitrabharathi – Indian Cinema Competition, Kannada Cinema (competition and screening of films in other dialects in Karnataka) and 100 years of Indian Cinema (screening of 14 films).

Complete line up:

Retrospective

Chan-Wook Park (South Korea)

1. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (Chan-Wook Park/110/2000/South Korea)

2. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (Chan-Wook Park/129/2002/South Korea)

3. Old boy (Chan-Wook Park/120/2003/South Korea)

4. Lady Vengeance (Chan-Wook Park/112/2005/South Korea)

5. Thirst (Chan-Wook Park/133/2009/South Korea)

Fatih Akin (Germany)

1. Short Sharp Shock (Fatih Akin/100/1998/Germany)

2. In July (Fatih Akin/99/2000/Germany)

3. Solino (Fatih Akin/124/2002/Germany)

4. Head On (Fatih Akin/121/2004/Germany/Turkey...

Moscow -- Kinotavr, Russia's main film festival, will kick off its 20th edition in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Sunday, featuring mostly films that were made before the global downturn hit the local film industry.

Festival organizers admit that the wide choice of movies for the main competition is unlikely to last, as the film industry struggles to stay afloat.

"This year, we selected 12 feature films out of 62 that were submitted," Sitora Aliyeva, the festival's programming director, told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that the selection committee is unlikely to have that many movies to choose from next year, given a sharp decline in local production.

According to Aliyeva, the economic downturn also hit the festival itself. "Our budget was cut roughly by half," she said. "The program is one day shorter and the number of guests and journalists has declined."

Among the features selected for the main competition...