Concluding today, 14 July, at the Apulia Film House in Bari was the 2023 edition of MEDIA: Talents on Tour, an intensive training programme structured into four stages and centred on ten emerging producers from the south of Italy. The initiative, born five years ago and promoted by the Creative Europe Desk Italy (composed of the Culture Office of Rome and of the MEDIA desks of Rome, Turin and Bari, managed by Cinecittà) and organised in collaboration with the Apulia Film Commission, the Calabria Film Commission, the Film Commission Regione Campania, the Lucana Film Commission and the Sicily Film Commission, this year started in Matera (12-13 June) to then continue in Benevento (21-22 June) and Catanzaro Lido (6-7 July) before reaching the Apulian capital yesterday 13 July.

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The main purpose of the programme is to increase producers’ skills, supporting their participation in the schemes set up by Creative Europe - MEDIA. For the first time, support is aimed at the development of a catalogue of projects, consisting of a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5 creative fiction, animation and documentary works intended for the European and international market. Areas covered by mentoring activities included sustainability, management of the catalogue projects in development with budgeting and financial plans, international co-production and contracts, market strategies, training courses and festivals. The mentors chosen for this year’s edition were Stefano Tealdi, Simone Catania, Alessandra Pastore and Ivan Olgiati. The emerging producers invited to participate, meanwhile, were Claudio Esposito from The Piranesi Experience, Lorenzo Cioffi from Ladoc, Claudia Canfora from Parallelo 41 Produzioni, Samantha Cito from Flicktales, Vincenzo de Marco from Beagle Media, Chiara Marotta from Lapazio Film, Luca Marino from Indaco Film, Marco Mingolla from Cattive Produzioni, Giovanni Rosa from Onirica and Francesco Inglese from Meleagris Film.

At the Cineporto offices, we met Fabiola Solvi, Enrico Bufalini and Andrea Coluccia, representing Creative Europe Desk Italy/Cinecittà.

On the European dimension of the endeavour, Bufalini underlined: “All of these projects work provided that they are made together with other European partners. [...] The possibility to co-produce with, or in any case to have acquisitions from other European countries, are fundamental conditions. And this also influenced the formation of their projects, which were oriented towards stories that could highlight Italian cultural and linguistic differences with respect to Europe and not to the regions of Italy. In that sense, [the producers] have modified their stories to make them more interesting for a European audience and for their partners, [i.e.] European co-producers, broadcasters and platforms.”  

“On the effectiveness of the initiative, another central indicator that we send to Brussels each time during the reporting phase - both to the Commission and to the executive agency - is of course the success rate of the projects. We now have five funded projects, almost one per year and all coming from different regions,” Coluccia specified.

Since 2018, MEDIA: Talents on Tour has brought remarkable results, with costs reduced and shared between the film commissions and Cinecittà, training 50 producers and mapping a total of 104. The five projects to benefit from the MEDIA development schemes are the documentary Caronte by Potenza-based Onirica srl (€25,000), the fiction film Comandante [+lee también:
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The results achieved on the funding of individual projects have prompted the organisers to work on increasing the participation of producers in the MEDIA slate schemes this year. “We had only had three [Southern Italian] nominations in eight years. [...] We wanted to improve that number, and therefore worked on a call in collaboration with the five film commissions to attract producers who already had a little more experience and who had already participated in one of the five editions of Talents, [...] working on profiles with projects already produced and distributed, preferably foreign co-productions, holders of project rights who had already received prizes and awards, and participated in markets and festivals,” Coluccia continued.

Finally, Solvi did not hide the fact that it was necessary to start from the fundamentals and push the mentors to openly share their past with the participants: “Initially, there even was a lack of curiosity to verify all the necessary information on the sites. [...] [The mentors] always start from their own experience to talk to the producers. [They say:] we’ve had this experience, there have been situations in which we too have found ourselves in difficulty, and these are the steps you should take to improve.”