Projects from Austria, Switzerland, Canada and Italy were among the winners at last night’s Locarno Pro Awards (Sunday 10 August). Locarno Pro,
Projects from Austria, Switzerland, Canada and Italy were among the winners at last night’s Locarno Pro Awards (Sunday 10 August).
Locarno Pro, the industry platform of the Locarno Film Festival, handed out prizes to projects in its work-in-progress section First Look, co-development programme Alliance 4 Development, the Antaviana Spanish Previews Award and the Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest.
First Look
The 14th edition of Locarno Pro’s works-in-progress section First Look focused this year on six feature films in post-production from Canada.
Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ Nina Roza picked up two awards: Toronto-based Urban Post Production’s First Look Award, which covers post-production services up to a value of CHF50,000, and the Jannuzzi Smith Award for the design of an international poster worth €10,000.
The jury said the ”stood out for its pretty integration of music and art, its performances and a captivating narrative that explores identity, exile and the idea of home and family. ”
Nina Roza was represented in Locarno by the film’s sales agent Marc Nauleau of Best Friend Forever, who attended Locarno for the very first time this year and revealed after the ceremony that the screening in the First Look showcase had also been his first experience of seeing the film on the massive screen.
Meanwhile, the Music Library &SFX/Acorde Award offering €45,000 in music supervision services at Music Library & SFX’s labs was presented to writer-producer-director Bryce Hodgson for his queer love fantasy Thanks To The Hard Work Of The Elephants Nick Butler’s second feature Lunar Sway picked up the Cineground Award, worth CHF15,000 of image finishing services, as well as Le Film Français’s award of advertising space to a value of €5,600.
Alliance 4 Development
Alliance 4 Development (A4D), for projects in development from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, presented two awards for the first time by the Geneva-based Masé sound postproduction studios.
The Masé Studio Postproduction Award, worth CHF25,000 in postproduction services, went to Goran Rebić’s In The Hidden, based on Ljuba Arnautović’s eponymous first novel from 2018 about her grandmother and her own family history, to be produced by the Amour Fou Group with Zuzana Mistriková of Slovakia’s PubRes.
Accepting the award with Rebić, producer Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu of Amour Fou Vienna stressed the project’s topical relevance “in these times where authoritarian populist regimes are gaining power everywhere.”
“It is very important to look back at the history of Europe and the rise of fascism in the 1930s and at the people who resisted,” he said. “This award is empowering us to move forward with the story of a strong woman who said ‘No’ to fascism and showed resistance for more than 11 years.”
The Masé Studio Award, worth CHF3,000, went to Swiss director Valentin Merz for his mystery drama Dark Chocolate which follows on from his debut feature De Noches Los Gatos Son Pardos that premiered in Locarno’s International Competition in 2022.
The sound studio gave an additional special award – with CHF10,000 worth of postproduction services – to Portuguese-Swiss filmmaker-actress Jenna Hasse for her second feature Snow.
The atmospheric drama set against the impressive backdrop of the Zermatt ski and mountain resort during one Christmas will see Hasse reunited with Langfilm’s Oliver Zobrist, who previously produced her debut Longing For The World which premiered at the Berlinale in 2023.
Meanwhile, Austrian writer-director Simon Maria Kubiena’s debut feature The Flowering of a Chimera – described by the producers of the recently launched Vienna-based Chimera Film as “a subtle, intimate story of healing between two men across generations” – took home two prizes: the Alphapanda Market Breakout Award of consultancy services to the value of €3,500 and the MIDPOINT Consulting Award for an in-depth online script consultancy.
French writer-director Anne Zinn-Justin’s debut feature, the female-driven eco-thriller Najma and Salomé, was awarded DreamAgo’s CHF5,000 script consultancy residency sponsored by the Valais Film Commission and including script doctoring by Sir Christopher Hampton, while the experimental film Solastalgia by the directing duo Yoer Gasmi and Mauro Mazzocchi received the Ticino Film Commission Residence Award consisting of two days of location scouting worth CHF4,000 and a Letter of Intent for financial support of up to CHF 12,000 if all or part of the film is shot in the Canton of Ticino.
Projects presented as part of the A4D platform in past years have included Mo Harawe’s Un Certain Regard 2024 premiere and multi-award-winner at this year’s Austrian Film Awards The Village Next To Paradise, and Willy Hans’ Der Fleck which had its world premiere at Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present section last year.
In addition, two projects from A4D’s 2023 line-up will have gone into production this year.
Schuldenberg Films’ production of Ann Oren’s absurd mystery drama Objet recently completed principal photography at locations in Germany and Luxembourg at the end of July, and an October start is scheduled for the shooting of the first co-production between Austria and Slovenia with Andrina Mracnikar’s Mila/Marija tracing a story of partisans’ armed resistance in Carinthia.
Spanish Previews
The first edition of a Spanish Previews showcase in Locarno wrapped with the Antaviana Spanish Previews Award going to Adrià Guxens’ hybrid documentary Lóngquán: The Dragon Spring consisting of a voucher worth €10,000, including editing rooms, colour grading suites, sound mix rooms and final deliveries.
Heritage Restoration Contest
Sunday’s awards ceremony also saw the announcement of the winner of the third edition of Locarno’s Heritage Restoration Contest picked from more than 30 applications from around the world of feature films that premiered in or before 2010.
The 1975 film Letter From My Village by the tardy Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye will receive a full restoration progress by the Cinegrell film lab, with the newly restored version then being shown at next year’s Locarno Film Festival.
“Thanks to this restoration, this powerful and poetic first feature will now be rediscovered by new generations,” the contest’s international jury said.
They added that, “with this choice, we celebrate not only the film’s enduring relevance, but also the legacy of a woman who paved the way for African cinema.”
Last year’s winner, Liliana Cavani’s 1969 film I Cannibali (The Year of the Cannibals), was presented in the restored 4K version in the festival’s Histoire(s) du cinéma: Heritage Online section on August 8 and 11.
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