Projects

Projects

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.

Goes to Cannes

The Editorial Office

Category: Tallinn Black Nights Goes to Cannes

Directed by: Roman Bondarchuk

Produced by: Darya Bassel (Moon Man) Darya Averchenko (South Films) Tanja Georgieva-Waldhauer (Elemag pictures)

Country of production: Ukraine, Germany

Original title: Редакція

Genre: Feature film

Language: Ukrainian, English

Runtime: 120 min (rough cut)

Completed in: 2023

Yura, working at a local nature museum, looking for a rare species, witnesses an arson in the forest. He brings the photos to a local newspaper, and gets a job there. With his new profession it dawns to him that the reality around him is a far cry from what is written in the newspaper.

Goes to Cannes

The Sunny Side of the Street

Category: HAF Goes to Cannes

Directed by: LAU Kok Rui

Produced by: Peter YAM, 70 Plus Production Company Limited, Vinod SEKHAR, Winnie TSANG, Soi CHEANG

Country of production: Hong Kong

Original title: 白日青春

Genre: Feature film

Language: Cantonese, Urdu

Runtime: 105min

Completed in: 2022

A young refugee boy is helped by a taxi driver to flee Hong Kong. They develop a father-son relationship until the boy discovers that the driver is his father’s murderer.

Goes to Cannes

Octopus Skin

Category: Thessaloniki Goes to Cannes

Directed by: Ana Christina Barragan Carrion

Produced by: Isabella Parra, Konstantina Stavrianou, Santiago Ortiz Monasterio, Titus Kreyenberg, Rena Vougioukalou + CALEIDOSCOPIO CINE, GRAAL FILMS, DESENLACE, UNAFILM

Country of production: Ecuador, Greece, Mexico, Germany, France

Original title: La Piel Pulpo

Genre: Feature film

Language: Spanish

Runtime: 90min

Completed in: 2022

Iris and Ariel are twins, who live with their mother and older sister on a rocky island covered with mollusks and birds, in a sibling relationship that surpasses the limits of normal intimacy. Iris decides to go alone to the city for the first time.

Frontières

In Flames

Category: Buyers Showcase

Directed by: Zarrar Kahn

Produced by: Citylights Media Inc.

Country of production: Canada, Pakistan

Genre: Horror, Psychological

Language: Urdu

After a fatal accident claims the life of Mariam’s boyfriend, she is haunted by unresolved grief. But, when her thoughts twist into vivid hallucinations, she must choose to confront her past or let her nightmares consume her.

Frontières

Roqia

Category: Proof of Concept

Directed by: Yanis Koussim

Produced by: Farès Ladjimi

Country of production: Algeria, France, USA

Genre: Horror

Language: Arabic

1993. Ahmed becomes amnesic after a car crash. Nowadays. An old raqi, a Muslim exorcist, is suffering from a dazzling Alzheimer. While Ahmed is increasingly afraid of recovering his memory, the raqi’s disciple fears that the loss of his master’s will causes the return of an evil locked up years ago.

Fantastic 7

The Bad Mother

Category: Fantastic 7

Directed by: Alicia Albares

Produced by: Alberto Díaz, Alexandre Bas, Cristina Urgel, Eva Moreno

Country of production: Spain

Original title: La mala madre

Genre: Horror

Language: Spanish

Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara

Victoria, a journalist who has written a highly controversial book on motherhood, wakes up in a house with no memory. Ángel, a doctor, tells her that she has had a car accident, in which his daughter died. The presence of a pregnant woman will help her discover the truth.

Animation Day

When Adams Changes

Directed by: Joël Vaudreuil

Produced by: Parce que films

Country of production: Canada

Original title: Adam change lentement

Language: French Canadian

Runtime: 90min not completed

Completed in: 2023

Adam is a 15-year-old teenager who has the strange peculiarity of having a body that changes, depending on the teasing and negative comments he receives from those around him. The accumulation of his physical changes just adds a layer to his already complex life.

Cannes Docs

Minor Attraction

Original title: Minor Attraction

Directed by: Amelia Evans

Produced by: Letisha Tate-Dunning (Little Fire Productions, New Zealand) Sam Oliver (Unvoicedmedia, United States)

Country of production: New Zealand, United States

Runtime: 90'

Expected release: December, 2022

Production stage: Post-Production (Advanced rough cut)

Budget: $251,000 (23% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: Sales agents / distributors, buyers, strategic guidance

Synopsis:

A filmmaker attempts to craft empathetic portraits of three people who acknowledge they have pedophilic desires but who claim never to have sexually interacted with a child—and who each want more support to keep it that way. What emerges is an intimate exploration into shame and loneliness, the limits of empathy, and the cost of our collective silence around desire, pleasure and the body.

Director’s profile:

Amelia Evans, a human rights lawyer-turned-filmmaker, is originally from New Zealand. She moved to the United States in 2010 after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship to study, and later teach, at Harvard University’s International Human Rights Clinic. But she had a hidden agenda: to learn filmmaking. She began sitting in on courses offered by nonfiction filmmakers she had long admired—Ross McElwee, Robb Moss and Alfred Guzzetti—eventually becoming part of the filmmaking community in Cambridge, MA. She has since received numerous art fellowships from some of the leading art institutions and residencies in the US for her work on Minor Attraction, including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Blue Mountain Center and Yaddo. She was named one of Independent Magazine’s “10 Filmmakers to Watch”. Minor Attraction is her first feature film.

Producers’s profile:

Producing in both London and New Zealand for the past 7 years, Letisha Tate-Dunning has worked on uncovering stories from the farthest corners of the globe. Her short documentary OK Chlöe (Dir: Charlotte Evans) was picked up by The New Yorker Documentary and numerous festivals including Short of the Week and Cinequest and she is currently in development on a follow-on feature documentary. Her docuseries We Speak Music screened at Sheffield DocFest and BFI London and most recently she produced a local story for Netflix Original docuseries Stories of a Generation. She is currently completing a producer placement with Catherine Fitzgerald of Blueskin Films, courtesy of the New Zealand Film Commission, and works part-time as a development producer for Warner Bros. NZ. She is in development on three feature documentaries, as well as several scripted and television projects.

Cannes Docs

Yintah

Original title: Yintah

Directed by: Michael Toledano; Jennifer Wickam; Brenda Michell

Produced by: Jennifer Wickam; Brenda Michell; Michael Toledano; Franklin Lopez (Yintah Film Ltd., Canada)

Country of production: Canada

Runtime: 90'; 44' (CBC broadcast)

Expected release: January, 2023

Production stage: Rough cut edit

Budget: $1,252,000 CAD (100% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: International distributor; festivals

Synopsis:

Yintah (the Wet’suwet’en word for land) follows Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham as they mobilize their nation in a decade-long battle against fossil fuel corporations, the Canadian government, and militarized police. Building homes and a healing centre on the route proposed for a series of gas and oil pipeline projects, Wet’suwet’en families assert their right to protect their land.

Director’s profile:

Michael Toledano is an award winning filmmaker and journalist based in British Columbia Canada, who has been documenting the historic, Indigenous-led resistance to fossil fuel pipelines on Wet’suwet’en territory since 2014. Michael has a strong background in photojournalism and documentary filmmaking. His work has been published by VICE, Al Jazeera America, Democracy Now!, CBC Fifth Estate, and shown across every major Canadian television news network. He is known for vibrant, ground-level documentation of social movements ranging from Black Lives Matter Toronto to No One is Illegal.

Jennifer Wickham is a member of Cas Yikh (Grizzly House) of the Gidimt’en (Bear/Wolf) Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. She fell in love with Wedzin Kwa in 2012 and moved home to defend her against the multiple pipelines proposed through her traditional territories. (ctd. below)

Co-Director’s profile:

Brenda Michell is Chief K-eltiy of the Unist’ot’en people of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. She has lived in the Wet’suwet’en communities of Witset and Burns Lake all her life, and was groomed to participate in Wet’suwet’en governance from a young age. Brenda is trained as a Wet’suwet’en language instructor and has worked as a post-secondary education coordinator for the Lake Babine Nation Band for decades. Brenda is a grandmother of ten and this fight is about protecting the Yintah for her grandchildren. She believes that this film is an important way to tell her people’s story and listen to the words of her Grandmother Knedebeas who always told her children, “Don’t let no white man take my yintah.”

Producers’s profile:

Jennifer Wickham is the Media Coordinator for Gidimt’en Checkpoint, a published poet, and is committed to defending the land for future generations. Her professional career includes being a high school educator, youth advocate, and work in language and culture revitalization.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, producer and editor Franklin López has been making political films for over 30 years, with a focus on social justice and environmental issues. He has published hundreds of films online since 1998 under the name subMedia, which have been watched by millions, broadcast on international TV networks and screened in alleyways and movie theaters all around the world. He has received accolades from the New York Times and Wired Magazine and had an entire chapter dedicated to this work in Breaking the Spell, a book about video activism.