T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival: New Horizons Studio 2016

Organized within the framework of the 16th T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival, the 7th edition of the New Horizons Studio took place from 24 to 26 July in Wrocław, the 2016 European Capital of Culture.

The most important training program of the T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival has two objectives: to teach, during three days, young European directors and producers about the workings of the international film market, particularly production, promotion and distribution, and to raise awareness of the importance of the pitch in the film pre-production process. In relation to the latter, it offers, as a matter of fact, training in pitching to twenty-four participants from ten countries all over Europe.

Apart from the aforementioned intense three-day teachings and lectures on production, promotion and distribution of a film, the participants also had the opportunity to take part in team-to-expert sessions about the pitch itself during which they discussed, in small teams, their projects and were then trained to pitch them. The experts who shared their know-how with the New Horizons Studio participants this year were Ewa Puszczyńska, the producer of the Academy Award-winning film “Ida”; Vincent Lucassen, the documentary producer and digital distribution specialist at Under the Milky Way; Kasia Karwan, a sales agent with Moonstruck Films; Guillaume de Seille of Arizona Productions; Raymond Phathanavirangoon, a producer and programmer, and Patrick Fischer and David Pope of the London Film Academy.

The 2016 list of participants included sixteen Polish producers and directors as well as eight young filmmakers from Austria, Portugal, The Netherlands, Italy, Israel and Romania: Giacomo Abruzzesse, Jasmin Baumgartner, Elżbieta Benkowska, Arkadiusz Biedrzycki, Marcin Bortkiewicz, Leonardo Cariglino, Agnieszka Chromicka, Teresa Czepiec, Oren Gerner, Grzegorz Jaroszuk, Olga Kałagate, Szymon Kapeniak, Anna Kasińska, Joanna Malicka, Ana Maria Pirvan, Johannes Proel, Maria Siniarska, Julia Sokolnicka, Eliza Subotowicz, Małgorzata Suwała, Arjun Talwar, Daniel Veloso, Maciej Wiktor, Magdalena Zambrzycka.

This year, the jury tasked with selecting the best pitch was composed of David Pope, Vincent Lucassen, the producer Alexandra Leszczyńska and Agata Czerner of the Torino Film Lab. They decided to split the awards into two parts. Indeed, the award of the London Film Academy offered a mentorship session to the team of Leonardo Cariglino, Monika Majorek and Joanna Malicka while the post-production facilities at the Arenberg Creative Mine studio in Lille – of a value of 10,000 Euro – went to the team of Arjun Talwar, Teresa Czepiec and Maria Siniarska.

To top it off, this year’s New Horizons Studio program wrapped with a master class by Marta Golba and Michał Marczak, the producer-director team behind “All These Sleepless Nights,” that focused on this Polish-UK coproduction and its festival run and strategy. Moreover, the film garnered a directing award at Sundance earlier this year and scored the Audience Award in the New Horizons Competition program at this edition of the T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival.

And, last but not least, we have to note that the New Horizons Studio workshops, have, over the past six years, already trained more than a hundred graduates from Poland and the rest of Europe.

The New Horizons Studio was organized by the New Horizons Association, the London Film Academy and Creative Europe Desk Poland in collaboration with the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv, the Italian Institute in Kraków, the Embassy of the Netherlands, Istituto Camoes, the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, the Transilvania International Film Festival, IndieLisboa and the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival.

About Tara Karajica for SydneysBuzz

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