First and second feature projects in advanced development from Ukraine, India, Philippines and Brazil won the four €40,000 production prizes of
First and second feature projects in advanced development from Ukraine, India, Philippines and Brazil won the four €40,000 production prizes of the 17th Meeting Event of TorinoFilmLab in the Italian city of Turin on November 23.
The three first features were Indian filmmaker Ashmita Guha Neogi’s Cold Ashes Can Cause Forest Fires, Filipino filmmaker Jarell Serencio’s The Boy And The Fight Of The Spiders and Brazil filmmaker André Hayato Saito’s Yellow Chrysanthemum.
The second feature was Kateryna Gornostai’s Ukrainian project Antonivka.
They were chosen from the TFL’s 10 FeatureLab projects by a jury comprised of Didar Domehri of France’s Maneki Films, Kristy Matheson, festival director of BFI London Film Festival, Julien Razafindranaly, head of sales at Films Boutique, Egypt’s Nada Riyadh, filmmaker and co-founder of Felucca Films, and Holger Stern, editor in chief of ARTE Film & Fiction in Germany.
Cold Ashes Can Cause Forest Fires is about a juvenile girl living with her father in an off-season hotel in the Himayalas who is drawn into an adults’ world of secrets and lies when family friends come to stay. The project is set up as an India-France co-production led by Avantika Singh Desbouvries of Paris-based Salt for Sugar Films. It has backing from the Hubert Bals Fund and has been selected for EAVE’s Ties That Bind workshop.
The Boy And The Fight Of The Spiders is a coming-of-age story set in a remote mining town produced by Manila-based Jed Medrano of FBN Media. Inspired by real events and people from the southern part of the Philippines known for a huge gold deposit, the film follows a spider-obsessed juvenile boy who is forced to grow up quickly when tragedy strikes. Development funding to date has come from CNC Script Development, SEAPitch Award, Southern Voices Lab, and the QCinema Co-Production Grant in the Philippines.
Produced by Mayra Faour Auad of Brazil’s MyMama Entertainment, Yellow Chrysanthemum is about the impact of grief on a family straddling two cultures, told through the eyes of a juvenile girl growing up in a Japanese family in Brazil. The film has previously participated in markets and labs including Ontario Creates, Shanghai Film Market, TIFF Filmmakers Lab and Cannes FocusCopro.
Antonivka Is Kyiv-based Gornostai’s follow-up to Stop-Zemlia, which screened in the Generation 14plus strand at the Berlinale in 2021. Her second film imagines a time after the end of the Ukraine-Russian war, when Ukraine has won and a juvenile couple move to the countryside to live with an elderly relative. When he dies they are forced to confront the ghosts of war and how to live with each other and in the world.
The film is produced by Vika Khomenko of the Moon Man outfit, also in Kyiv. To date, it has received backing from the Ukrainian Film Academy’s Script Development Grant Programme, in partnership with Netflix, and the ESFUF development fund.
SeriesLab and ComedyLab awards
Two €10,000 development awards for TFL’s SeriesLab projects were presented to The Heir, by UK writer and creator Abiola Ogunbiyi, and Swedish seriesThe Making Of A Terrorist, from writer and creator Leif Edlund and writer Emelia Hansson.
The Heir is a genre project about a London doctor who inherits her father’s powers of mind control and begins to suspect she may be linked to a group of Nigerians with the same abilities, all of whom were brought to the UK as children.
The Making Of A Terrorist portrays a bereaved man with a four-month-old baby and a mountain of debt whose relationship with society begins to break down when he fears society has let him down.
The SeriesLab jurors were Mignon Huisman, head of series NPO, Netherlands, UK producer Sophie Taylor-Gooby and Iñigo Trojaola, editorial director at Spain’s Movistar+.
A €5,000 award for the winner of TFL’s inaugural ComedyLab was won by writers and directors Stefano La Rosa and Luca Renucci for The Last Queen, about a hard-working family woman in a petite town near Venice who pretends to be the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette to bring happiness to an ailing ancient Countess.
The ComedyLab jury was Oscar Alonso, head of distribution at Spain’s Lazona Pictures, French producer Gabrielle Dumon of Paris-based Sciapode, and Laura Nacher, head of sales at The Match Factory.
The 17th annual TFL Meeting Event takes place on the eve of the Torino Film Festival and is the culmination of the four annual Labs – Feature, Script, Comedy and Series – organised by TFL. It brings together the filmmakers in each Lab for the final week in which they pitch their projects to an audience of international industry executives and participate in one-to-one meetings with the aim of finding potential co-production, sales and funding partners to take the projects to support progress the projects to the next stage. The Meeting Event culminates in the awards ceremony.
TorinoFilmLab is organised by Museo Nazionale Cinema, with the support of Creative Europe – MEDIA Sub-programme of the European Union, MiC Ministero della Cultura, Regione Piemonte, Città di Torino, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT, GTT and AMNC.
Futher TFL and partner awards 2024
TFL Co-Production Funds (€50,000)
Awaiting Birds
Dir: Sofía Quirós Ubeda (Costa Rica / Argentina)
Prod: Elisa Fernanda Pirir (Norway)
Past Future Continuous
Dirs: Firouzeh Khosrovani, Morteza Ahmadvand (Iran)
Prod: Giulia Campagna (Italy).
Eurimages co-production development award (€20,000)
The Criminals (ScriptLab)
Dir: Serhat Karaaslan (Turkey)
CNC award (€8,000)
Josie Goes To War (ScriptLab)
Dir: Coline Confort (France)
Scr: Perrine Prost ( France)
Artekino International award (€6,000)
Explorer (ScriptLab)
Dir: Hilke Rönnfeldt (Germany-Iceland)
ARRI award (€10,000)
A Day In The Life Of Jo: Chapter Phaedra (FeatureLab)
Dir: Jacqueline Lentzou (Greece)
ProdL Annabelle Aronis (France – Greece) – 2nd feature film.
Sub-Ti award (€2,000)
Sea, Star, Woman
Scr-Prod: Jeunghae Yim (Korea)
Prod: Helen Olive (UK)
Sub-Ti access award (€5,000)
The Night Burns
Dir: Angelica Gallo (Italy)
Prod: Andrea Gori (Italy)
IEFTA award (€3,000)
Dear Insects And Other Creepy Stories
Dir-Prod: Karla Lulić (Croatia)
Prod: Jelena Mađarić (Croatia)
Post-production award
Sealskin (Scriptlab 2022, FeatureLab 2023)
Dir: Irene Moray (Spain)
Prod Marta Cruañas (Vilaüt films – Spain)
Green awards
TFL White Mirror (€5,000)
The Funeral (ScriptLab)
Dir-scr: Carolina Markowicz (Brazil)
Green filming awards (joint venture between TFL and Trentino Film Commission consisting of a €4,000 contribution for the implementation of sustainable production)
Antonivka (FeatureLab)
Dir: Kateryna Gornostai (Ukraine)
Prod: Vika Khomenko (Ukraine)
Cold Ashes Can Cause Forest Fires (FeatureLab)
DIr: Ashmita Guha Neogi (India)
Prod: Avantika Singh Desbouvries (India)
Legacy (FeatureLab)
Dir: Aliaksei Paluyan (Belarus)
Prod: Paulina Toenne ( Germany)
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