Festival spotlight: Karlovy Vary’s Industry Strand Eastern promises to improve its game for the 56th edition

Eastern Promises, the popular industrial destination of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, has spent the last two years online only for the Covid-19 event, but the upcoming seventh edition of the event is now gearing up for what lies ahead. It will be a year of harvest as it will physically return on Sunday 3 June.

The three-day event, which aims to promote regional and international directors with distributors, sales agents, producers and festival programmers, will reveal 35 selected film projects, in all different phases: Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch, First Cut + Works in Progress International Film Festival Presentations of Works in Progress. The most promising projects will receive prizes of up to 125,000 euros ($ 151,850).

“The most important thing right now is that we are back in the physical situation and on the spot,” said Hugo Rosaki, head of the film industry office. “We have tried the online edition at previous events and are now looking forward to the physical peel event.”

This year, its First Cut + program, launched in 2020 to increase sales of the feature films that participated in its First Cut Lab, is expanding and involving projects outside of Central and Eastern Europe, which was once the his duty. . In addition to its new Proxima Competition line, which opens and covers stories beyond the region, this year First Cut + will feature projects from Canada, Brazil, as well as a joint UK / US / India co-production. Red fish.

“We are checking out,” Rosak said. “I still want to keep our industrial department somewhat specialized, because we still want to be relevant and have experience in something. Many of these Central and Eastern European projects often have more difficult routes to complete production, especially from Eastern European countries, so we see that this is still a mission for us in terms of industry, but we are also experimenting. Including projects from a broader geographical background. I’m excited and curious to see how it will turn out. “

On the other hand, the festival launches its KVIFF Talents, a talent development program that will run throughout the year. The aim is to support emerging filmmakers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia and provide them with an “alternative form of production”.

“In the Czech film industry, we live in a situation where many directors are waiting to shoot their first feature film, when they will receive funding from the state fund, but the state funding does not necessarily support low-budget or daring projects.” Budget projects. ” , he said. “They are very careful in distributing taxpayer money, of course, and I think we will see less distribution in the next few years. This is our way of looking for creativity and towards it. We want to be able to create something with a small budget. [within €200,000]. “

Rozak adds that the goal is to match selected projects and talents with tutors and staff in a “tailor-made” way.

In this way, he says, “they will have more chances of finding private investment money along the way and more chances of seeking funding through the state, as they already will be through this type of development lab.”

KVIFF Talents is divided into two sections, which run in parallel: Creative Pool focuses on ideas for audiovisual works of any format or genre, from short films to web series and podcasts, while Feature Pool supports fast-paced live action films .

Additionally, located in the new KVIFF.TV Park space, the festival will open its Film Distribution Innovation Hub, a public exhibition featuring a variety of innovative digital tools created by representatives of various technical companies to provide alternative methods of distributing works.

As previously announced, the Odessa Film Festival of Ukraine intends to organize a section of its works in the field of industry. Directed and programmed by the staff of the Odessa Film Festival, Karlovy Vary offers space for the screening of works in progress for this festival. The Odessa Film Festival will run from 23 to 30 July and its festival director, Anna Machukh, noted that the format of the festival, online or in person, will depend on the situation in Ukraine.

“This is what we hope will be useful to our Ukrainian friends, because in a way it will help these films not to get stuck in the process and we hope to eliminate the opportunity,” Rosak said. “A lot of the funding in Ukraine, of course, came from the war, not from the movies. So let’s hope we can still identify the work that exists. “

Rozak says the initiative was a “more important way” to support Ukraine rather than show retrospectives of Ukrainian films.

He adds: “We really want to help these producers continue to show what they have. For us, this is a continuation of two years of uncertainty because we just had a pandemic and now there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the war as well. “We must do everything to help our Ukrainian friends.”