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Drawn from an exciting Locarno Pro lineup, these talents – directors, producers and industry execs – impacted at Locarno, and will often in the future. Nine are women, which says a lot about cutting-edge innovation in Europe and beyond.

Despina Athanassiadis, France

Born in France and with Greek roots, Athanassiadis is currently focusing on her Alliance4Development project “The Young One,” about female truck drivers – “It’s a story of transmission, from older to younger generation” – which was awarded script consultancy residency at DreamAgo. “As a filmmaker, I’m interested in people who struggle. I find it fascinating, watching how they find ways to fix their problems. I want to see them on screen,” she states. In her next film, she will focus on a middle-aged French woman, whose life changes forever when she goes to Greece. “It’s a movie with inner and outer journeys, and with lots of international characters.

Locarno– New titles from “The Pretenders’” Vallo Toomla and Sara Summa, director of “The Last to See Them,“ rub shoulders with Nina Menkes’ “Minotaur Rex” and scarefest “All the World Drops Dead,” from Kevin Kopacka, in a lineup of some 150 projects being brought to Locarno Pro networking and co-production forum Match Me!

Shepherding them are 30 producers hailing from the length and breadth of Europe, plus Taiwan and the Dominican Republic, in town for the three-day event, kicking off Friday.

Set up at mainly young-ish production houses, they underscore major trends now coursing through European cinema: the rise of genre and animation – such as Christophe Reveille’s “To Live and Die with Che Guevara” an animated doc feature about three guerrillas who pledged allegiance to Che Guevara – as well as films of large artistic ambition made on contained budgets, such as Taiwan’s “Goodbye North, Goodbye.”

Above all, there’s a...

Estonia’s Taska Film, the production company behind local box-office hits such as medieval crime thriller “Melchior the Apothecary,” hits Locarno’s Match Me! industry sessions with a slate that includes Jaak Kilmi’s “Dirt in Your Face,” a coming-of-age rock drama set in the twilight of the Soviet Union backed in part by Apollo, the largest cinema chain in the Baltic region.

The film follows 17-year-old Mihkel and his band as they go on a journey full of alcohol, protest and music to impress a Western producer visiting a rock festival in 1980s Soviet Estonia. In their struggle to keep the band together, the group inadvertently help split the Soviet Union apart.

“Dirt in Your Face” is written by Martin Algus and based on the bestseller of the same name by Mihkel Raud, a former member of the ’80s band Golem (pictured) on whom the movie is based. It...