POLISH PROJECTS AT IDFA FORUM
Two projects that have either a Polish producer or a co-producer will participate in this year’s IDFA Forum pitches accompanying IDFA festival. The first is “Yula’s Dream” by Hanna Polak and the second- “Around my family table” by Norwegian director Ase Svenheim Drivenes.
This year’s edition of the IDFA Forum pitching, organized within the framework of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, will be held from 25th to 27th November. Two Polish projects have been invited to participate in the Forum: the Polish-Danish project “Yula’s Dream” directed by Hanna Polak’s and produced by Hanna Polak Films and Danish Documentary Production as well as the Norwegian –Polish project “Around my family table” directed by Ase Svenheim Drivenes and produced by Sant & Usant AS and AMP Polska.
Both projects will be presented in the Work in Progress Screenings section designed for the films that are currently at the last stage of production. The projects featured in this section are presented to commissioning editors, distributors, sales agents and festival programmers through a screening of 25-30-minutes of the footage, followed by a 15-minute Q&A session.
Hanna Polak, "Yula’s Dream" director, for 13 years has been accompanying with a camera the title character, Yula, who lives in the Moscow svalka, which is the biggest garbage dump in Europe. It’s seventeen stories high and over a mile long and it’s a fenced-in, walled-off area where no one is allowed entry—except for the garbage trucks that come and go with a chillingly robotic regularity. And yet people manage to live here, an estimated one thousand of them, the most destitute of Russia’s underclass. Eleven-year-old Yula, the protagonist of the film, is one of these people. She lives behind its fence and concrete; officially she doesn’t exist; the external world couldn’t care less about her. However, like any other adolescent girl, she laughs and falls in love, dyes her hair and does makeup to look beautiful. Yula has only one dream: to leave svalka one day .
“Around my family table” is the story of Kuba (13 years old) and Mikołaj (8 years old), whose parents were forced to leave Poland to work abroad after the family business went bankrupt. Their father works in a factory in Scotland and the boys have hardly seen him since he left two years ago. Their mother works in Austria, and travels between Vienna and Poland to see the boys in the weekends. Kuba dreams of a normal family life, where every night the whole family would meet around the table When mum and dad are away, the boys are dependent on help from their grandparents and neighbors, but Kuba doesn’t get on well with grandma and grandpa drinks. Kuba prefers to stay in the house by himself and tries his best to take care of his little brother. Kuba’s mum has promised that it won’t be long until they will live together, but as weeks turn to months, Kuba’s hope of being with his family again slowly fades away.
Apart from Work in Progress Screenings, the projects qualified to participate in the IDFA Forum may be presented in one of the following categories: The Central Pitch, The Round Table Pitch or Docs4Cinema Meetings. The Central Pitch is limited to projects with 25% to 75% of their financing in place. They should have a three-minute trailer and be supported by a commissioning editor or other financier. Each pitch takes seven minutes and is followed by an eight-minute question-and-answer session.
The Round Table Pitch is organized in a more intimate atmosphere than The Central Pitch. The project is in a development/pre-production phase, production phase or rough-cut phase. There are no restrictions regarding the amount of financing already in place. Each participant will have 20 minutes to present their project and discuss it with the gathered decision-makers. Two of the Round Table Pitchs are genre-specific– one of them is devoted to cross media projects, the second – to projects of films about art and culture.
Docs4Cinema Meetings is a section designed for documentary projects suitable for theatrical release and projects need to be looking for local co-producers and theatrical distributors. Producers will not pitch publically but will benefit from one-on-one meetings with producers interested in co-production, distributors and even funds.
More information about IDFA Forum can be found here.