Projects

Projects

Cannes Docs

Twice Colonized

Original title: Twice Colonized

Directed by: Lin Alluna

Produced by: Emile Hertling Péronard (Ánorâk Film, Greenland & Denmark), Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Red Marrow Media, Canada), Stacey Aglok MacDonald (Red Marrow Media, Canada) and Bob Moore (EyeSteelFilm, Canada)

Country of production: Greenland, Denmark, Canada

Runtime: 90', 60', 48'

Expected release: January, 2023

Production stage: Post production

Budget: €916,584 (90% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: Sales agents, distributors, buyers, outreach, festivals

Synopsis:

Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter fights to ensure Indigenous people a seat in European policy when her son suddenly dies by suicide and she embarks on a personal journey writing her story. At the same time she struggles to break free from an abusive relationship, but as tension builds, a key question arises: is it possible to change the world and yourself at the same time?

Director’s profile:

Lin expresses herself through international, character-driven documentaries. She aims to portray brave women who want to change themselves and the world, while cinematically exploring how to amplify their stories to an audience by challenging the limits of reality. From 2013-2017 she was admitted to the National Film School of Denmark as one of only six directors. Lin has been selected one of the new Nordic Talents by Nordic Film and Television, and is a Euroimage grantee as well as a IDFA Academy, UnionDocs, DFI Outreach and Circle Doc Accelerator lab fellow. Lin is chair member at the Danish Film Directors association and the film director’s representative adviser at the Danish Artists Council, as well as co-founder and spokesperson for Oplysningsgruppen (NGO for higher education of filmmakers in Denmark).

Producers’s profile:

Producers Emile Hertling Péronard and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril are both Inuit producers, but from opposite sides of the colonial borders that Denmark and Canada have imposed on their people. Emile produces authentic stories in a Greenlandic context for international audiences, while promoting Indigenous film content, as well as improving the general conditions for Indigenous filmmakers. Alethea is based in Iqaluit, the same town where Aaju lives, she has worked with Aaju on several projects, and has archive footage of Aaju going back around 15 years. Twice Colonized will be the first formal co-production between Inuit from Greenland and Canada. The collaborative aspects of Lins work methods with Aaju, Emile and Alethea is enabling us to come together as a team and tell this very important story from a unique, insider perspective.

Goes to Cannes

Follower

Category: Film Bazaar Goes to Cannes

Directed by: Harshad Nalawade

Produced by: Vinay Mishra, Jaideep Varma, Saket Gyani, Maulik Sharma

Country of production: India

Original title: Follower

Genre: Feature film

Language: Marathi, Kannada and Hindi

Runtime: 99min

Completed in: 2022

In a territorially disputed town, a radicalized journalist believes in exposing the atrocities faced by his community. But as the line between his professional and personal life blurs, an inconvenient truth makes him reflect back on a simpler time when he had not yet succumbed to radicalization.

Ukraine in Focus

When We Were 15 (us, 15)

Category: Ukrainian Features Preview

Directed by: Anna Buryachkova

Produced by: Natalia Libet, Vitalii Sheremetiev (Digital Religion (DGTL RLGN) LLC)

Country of production: Ukraine

Original title: Koly nam bulo 15

Genre: Feature film

Language: Ukrainian

Runtime: 90

Completed in: 2023

Synopsis:

15-year old Tonya is the new girl at school. She is facing questions of her ex-boyfriend abuse, dealing with her sexuality and accepting loneliness while trying to find her place in the adult world.

Frontières

Hostile Dimensions

Category: Buyers Showcase

Directed by: Graham Hughes

Produced by: Graham Hughes & Evrim Ersoy (Blue Finch Film Releasing)

Country of production: United Kingdom

Genre: Horror, Science-fiction

Language: English

When a graffiti artist seemingly ‘vanishes’, two documentary filmmakers must travel through alternate dimensions, facing their worst nightmares to uncover the truth.

Frontières

Pesta

Category: Proof of Concept

Directed by: Hanne Berkaak

Produced by: Tonje Skar Reiersen & Lise Fearnley (Mikrofilm)

Country of production: Norway

Genre: Folk Horror

Language: Norwegian

Set in Norway during the Black Plague (1349), PESTA is a romantic folk horror film about four teenagers fighting to survive as the world as they know it is coming to an end.

Goes to Cannes

One-dimensional Man

Category: Tallinn Black Nights Goes to Cannes

Directed by: Andres Puustusmaa

Produced by: Katerina Monastyrskaya, Roberts Vinovskis (Leo Films, Studio Locomotive)

Country of production: Estonia, Latvia

Original title: ÜHEMÕÕTMELINE MEES

Language: Estonian, English, Russian, Chinese

Runtime: 105 min

Completed in: 2023

Raul was raised in a violent and pathological attitude, blindly driven by communist ideology. Driven by his jealousy of his wife and her bohemian lifestyle, Viktor, being a high ranking KGB officer, stated her as a predator against the Soviet nation, and one early morning she is taken by KGB agents.

Cannes Docs

Tish

Original title: Tish

Directed by: Paul SNG

Produced by: Jennifer CORCORAN (Freya Films, UK)

Country of production: United Kingdom

Runtime: 90', 60'

Expected release: June, 2023

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: €380.000 (100% in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents / Distributors, Buyers, Strategic Guidance

Synopsis:

Tish Murtha was a photographer whose images of people on the margins of society in Thatcher’s Britain challenged and documented the inequality she herself had suffered. Despite early acclaim Tish was unable to make a living from photography and she died in poverty. Tish’s daughter Ella explores why she did not receive her due and what her work tells us about the value placed on working-class communities.

Director’s profile:

Paul Sng is a bi-racial British Chinese filmmaker based in Edinburgh, Scotland whose work focuses on people who challenge the status quo. His work has been broadcast on television and screened internationally. His feature film credits include DISPOSSESSION and POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHE (winner of BIFA 2021 Best Documentary, BIFA 2021 Raindance Discovery Award). He is a BAFTA Breakthrough 2022/23 artist.

Producer’s profile:

Jen Corcoran is a creative producer based in Newcastle, UK. Jen established Freya Films with a focus on thoughtful, contemporary storytelling and narratives from the margins across both documentary and fiction. Jen’s BIFA-nominated documentary NASCONDINO [HIDE AND SEEK] (BFI Doc Society Fund) premiered In Competition at LFF 2021 and CPH:DOX 2022 while her previous work has played at Tribeca, Sheffield DocFest and BFI Flare among others. Jen led award-winning regional development programme Tees Valley Screen between 2019-2020 and is a freelance film programmer and lecturer.

Cannes Docs

Mama no himitsu

Original title: Mama no himitsu

Directed by: Laurence LÉVESQUE

Produced by: Catherine BOILY (Metafilms, Canada), Rosalie CHICOINE PERREAULT (Metafilms, Canada)

Country of production: Canada

Runtime: 90'

Expected release: January, 2023

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: $499.640 (100% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: Festivals, Sales Agents, Distributors, Buyers

Synopsis:

Noriko Oi, a Japanese-Canadian woman, returns to her native land in the hopes of reviving her deceased mother’s memories, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb, while emptying her childhood home. What is left of memories when families’ secrets are locked away and end up casting a shadow over the collective recollections?

Director’s profile:

In 2017, Laurence directed a short fiction film, DRAP CONTOUR, which won several international awards. She then signed a short documentary, PORT D’ATTACHE, in 2019. The film was selected at the prestigious Visions du Réel, won the Best National Short Film Award at RIDM and was nominated for best short film at the Québec-Cinéma gala. In 2022, Laurence completes a master’s degree in which she reflects on documentary writing and directing. MAMA NO HIMITSU is her first feature film.

Producer’s profile:

After graduating from the Los Angeles City College Theatre Academy in 2012 where she studied acting, Catherine Boily then started to get involved as a producer on various projects. Moving back to Montreal in 2015, she met Sylvain Corbeil and Nancy Grant from Metafilms, with whom she’s been working with since. Under Metafilms, Catherine has produced many short films and music videos, in addition to working multiple positions on feature films shot in Canada, the United States, Czech Republic, England and Namibia. Most recently, she was also an Executive Producer with Martin Scorcese on the latest Paul Schrader movie The Card Counter, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Biennale. Catherine is now developing emerging talents’ feature films projects at Metafilms.
Rosalie Chicoine Perreault searches for projects and filmmakers with a unique vision that stand out from the current cinematographic landscape, both in fiction and documentary. Amongst her most recent projects, GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE (Jacquelyn Mills, 2022), her first feature documentary, was awarded three prizes during its world premiere at the 72nd Berlinale, in addition to winning Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs. « 

Cannes Docs

Once Upon a Time in a Forest (WT)

Original title: Olipa kerran metsä (WT)

Directed by: Virpi SUUTARI

Produced by: Virpi SUUTARI (Euphoria film oy, Finland)

Country of production: Finland

Runtime: 90', 120'

Expected release: April, 2024

Production stage: 4/5 shot, editing has started

Budget: €455.000 (90 % in place)

1st feature: No

Looking for: Festival Premiere, Other Festivals, Distributor, Gap Financing, Strategic Guidance

Synopsis:

Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a film about brave young people who are defending one of the last coniferous forest areas in Europe. It is a morality play and a love story of a younger generation whose main object of love is the Finnish forest. This cinematic documentary explores environmental feelings and witnesses how the 22-year old protagonist Ida grows up to be the leader of the new Forest Movement.

Director’s profile:

Virpi Suutari is an award winning filmmaker known for her personal cinematic style and emotional narratives that often challenge the borderline between documentary and fiction. One of her most beloved films is The Garden Lovers (2014). Her films have been shown in the major festivals such as IDFA, Visions du Réel, CPH: DOX, Locarno and Gothenburg film festival. Her latest feature documentary AALTO (2020) on architect Alvar & Aino Aalto has been distributed all over the world. The Idle Ones (2002) was nominated for the Best European Documentary (EFA) and she has won several awards as the best nordic documentary. Suutari has received the national film academy award, the Jussi Award, three times. Suutari has also worked as a journalist in the major newspapers in Finland. She is the member of the European Film Academy and the honorary Doctor of Arts in the University of Lapland.

Producer’s profile:

Virpi Suutari is an experienced and an award winning documentary film maker. She has worked in this field for almost 30 years and she is now one of the main owners of Euphoria film, a film production company based in Helsinki.
In the recent years Suutari has produced some of her own films such as short films Elegance (2016) and A People’s radio – Ballads from a Wooded Country (2021) and a feature documentary AALTO (2020) which has been distributed by Autlook filmsales and sold widely across the world.

Cannes Docs

Touché

Original title: Touché

Directed by: Martina Moor

Produced by: Filippo Macelloni (NANOF, Italy)

Country of production: Italy, Belgium

Runtime: 85'

Expected release: September, 2023

Production stage: Post-production

Budget: €185.000 (80% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: Festivals, Buyers

Synopsis:

Italo-Brazilian fencing champion Nathalie Moellhausen filmed intimately over 10 years. Three Olympics with two different flags. Challenges, defeats (many) and victories (few). A legendary trainer, a number of dubious mentors, a famous chef as a boyfriend. A distressing relationship with a cumbersome father. A turbulent journey, defined by blind ambition and haunted by demons of failure.

Director’s profile:

Martina Moor, is an Italian filmmaker and editor based in Brussels. She graduated in Visual Arts and Theatre from University of Architecture of Venice and later she gained an MA in TV Screen Documentary from Goldsmith University, in London. Since 2010 she has been directing and producing several short experimental films and edited award winning feature documentaries and video art pieces. Touché is her first feature length documentary film as director.

Producer’s profile:

Filippo Macelloni is an award-winning director, producer and writer. His work has played in numerous film festivals and on TV networks across the world. In 2001, together with Lorenzo Garzella, he founded NANOF, independent production company based in Rome, committed to develop and produce documentaries, fiction and cross media projects. Some of their most significant film credits include: “Climbing Iran” (2020), “The Disappearance of My Mother”, premiered at Sundance 2019; “The lost World Cup”, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, “Silvio Forever”, released in 2011.