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With Baltic shows growing bigger and bolder and producers looking for more international collaborators, local creators reach for original stories and established IPs, delivering period dramas and timely satires. However, crime shows, whether contemporary – like this year’s Berlinale Series Market Selects “My Dear Mother” – or set in the 19th century, still take the crown. Or at least the top hat.

“Melchior the Apothecary”

Creators: Indrek Hargla, Elmo Nüganen, Olle Mirme

Director: Elmo Nüganen

Based on popular crime series books by Indrek Hargla – about an apothecary who heals the sick and solves mysteries – the show is set in medieval Tallinn. Shot as a trilogy, which was a box-office success in Estonia, it’s sold by Global Screen as a miniseries. It features Märten Metsaviir and Maarja Johanna Mägi, who was chosen as one of Berlinale’s Shooting Stars and will be next seen in the Finnish remake of “Cold Feet.

European feature development programme Less Is More (Lim) has selected 16 feature projects for its 2025 edition, including Naomi Waring’s UK title Drifters.

The project follows a 19-year-old in Belfast’s underground community of drifters, who finds healing through a group of other young fathers.

Scroll down for the full list of participants

Waring is a graduate of the London Film School, who has made shorts including this year’s Milk.

Also on the Lim selection is Scraps, a thriller from French writer-director Quentin Nozet set in a deserted village where a stranger arrives looking for a job.

18 writers have been selected across the 16 projects,...

This year, Latvia is sharing a spotlight with neighboring Lithuania and Estonia at the European Film Market, which has dedicated its 2023 Country in Focus Spotlight to the Baltic nations. It’s a sign of the tremendous strides the country has taken to put itself on the world cinema map, with the screen industries both producing more films and TV series than ever before and luring increasingly ambitious international projects to Northeastern Europe.

Here’s a rundown of some of the top Latvian projects in the pipeline that their producers will be pitching in Berlin:

Blue Blood

Director: Juris Kursietis

Producers: White Picture, Stellar Film, Asterisk*

The follow-up to Kursietis’ Cannes Directors’ Fortnight player “Oleg” is the story of a successful couple whose comfortable life is turned upside-down when the husband is implicated in a massive corruption scandal.

Sales: N/A

Soviet Milk

Director: Ināra Kolmane

Producers: Jānis Juhņēvičs, Marta Romanova-Jēkabsone...

Event took place in Trieste from January 22-25

Projects from Spain, Ukraine and Belgium shared the top prizes at this year’s When East Meets West (Wemw) co-production forum, which was held in Trieste from January 22-25.

Spanish filmmaker Enrique Buleo’s Still Life With Ghosts won the €5,000 Center Serbia Award. Produced by Spain’s Quatre Films and France’s Ikki Films, the film tells the story of ghosts and humans who seek to resolve their everyday problems in a small village in rural Spain. Buleo’s short Hell and Such received a Special Jury Mention at the 2019 Clermont-Ferrand festival.

Adult children: Girl Blazes Through Childhood in Olte’s Debut

Frantically moving and tweaking, the handheld camera desperately tries not to lose focus of a stone-faced tomboyish teenage girl Anastasia (Emma Skirmante), the protagonist of first-time director Linda Olte‘s coming-of-age drama Sisters. The opening scene in which Anastasia runs and tries to break through a metal fence commands attention in a way the rest of the film rarely does.

Anastasia has every reason to want to escape. She lives in a Latvian orphanage with her charming little sister Diana (Gerda Aljēna), awaiting the arrival of their potential foster parents from America.…...

The Rome-based sales outfit has committed to focusing on more international titles this year.

Italy’s True Colours has unveiled its 2022 Cannes Marché slate, as it commits to focusing on more international titles this year.

The Rome-based sales outfit will start selling rights for Delta, Michele Vannucci’s second film after 2016 Venice Horizons debut I Was A Dreamer. The film, produced by Groenlandia and Kino Produzioni with Rai Cinema, is finished and looking for festival slots. The noir drama stars Alessandro Borghi and Luigi Locascio (both David di Donatello winners for On My Skin and One Hundred Steps, respectively) in...

The Latvian-Italian co-production, staged by Fenixfilm and Albolina Film, will be ready for release in spring 2022. Latvian filmmaker Linda Olte is now preparing her first fiction feature, a drama entitled Sisters. The story, penned by the helmer herself, follows two sisters, 13-year-old Anastasia and nine-year-old Diana. When the head of the orphanage tells them that the Johnson family from the USA wants to adopt them, Diana feels as if she’s won the lottery and cannot wait to go to the States. Anastasia, on the other hand, has mixed feelings. She is hoping to live with her biological mother, who makes a sudden return to their lives. The film’s main cast includes Emma Skirmante, Gerda Aljēna, Katrīna Krēsliņa and Iveta Pole. The technical crew members are DoP Aleksandrs Grebņevs, production designer Laura Dišlere and costume designer Sieglinde Michaeler. Shot in Latvia and Italy in both English and Latvian, the movie’s.

Milcho Manchevski, Pablo Berger.

Co-productions from French director Michel Hazanavicius and Belgian filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are among 24 selected for funding in the latest Eurimages round.

Hazanavicius, whose 2011 title The Artist which won five Oscars including best picture and director, receives €470,000 towards Franco-Belgian animation The Most Precious Of Cargoes.

Adapted from a 2019 novel by French writer Jean-Claude Grumberg, the animated film is set during the Second World War, when a Jewish father throws one of his twins from the train to Auschwitz in a desperate attempt to save him. The boy is then discovered by a childless Polish couple.