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BLACK NIGHTS 2015 Industry

Together For Ever and Motherland win awards at Tallinn's Baltic Event

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- The projects, both hailing from Lithuania, have won the FilmFly Award for Works-in-Progress and the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, respectively

Together For Ever and Motherland win awards at Tallinn's Baltic Event
From left to right, Dagne Vildziunaite, Tomas Vengris and Uljana Kim, with their awards (© Black Nights/Pastakeda)

Yesterday, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival's industry section handed out the awards to the projects selected in its various sections.

Director Lina Luzyte and producer Dagne Vildziunaite’s Lithuanian-Romanian co-production Together For Ever [+see also:
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 won the FilmFly Award for Works in Progress. This year, 14 projects selected by BE Works in Progress and eight selected by BNFF in the inaugural International Works in Progress competed for this award together in the Estonian Film Institute’s FilmFly training programme, which aims to boost private-sector investment in the new-media and film industries. The Match Factory's Zsuzsi Bankuti, Karlovy Vary Film Festival programmer Lenka Tyrpakova, and Istanbul Film Festival advisor Azize Tan, all on the jury, stated: “The combination of the selected scenes and the presentation by the producer made us believe in the international potential of the film.”

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The jury also gave out two Special Mentions to Egyptian-French co-production Ali, the Goat and Ibrahim by director Sherif Elbendary and producers Hossam Elouan and Mohamed Hefzy; and to Austrian-Ukrainian co-production Ugly by director Juri Rechinsky and producers Franz Novotny and Alexander Glehr. Find out more about the selected projects here.

In the meantime, the Baltic Event Co-Production Market awarded the inaugural Eurimages Co-Production Development Award worth €20,000 to Motherland [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
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 by Lithuanian writer-director Tomas Vengris and producer Uljana Kim. This is the first time that Eurimages has presented an award at Baltic Event in Tallinn – which thus joins the exclusive group of seven markets, such as Rotterdam’s Cinemart and the Berlinale Co-production Market, with this prize. The jury, made up of Polish producer Ewa Puszczynska, Norway's Nordisk Film & TV Fond CEO Petri Kemppinen and New Screen NL head Dorien van de Pas, said, “We decided to give our development prize to a project that tells a multi-layered story about immigration. The main characters come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as an ideal country. Leaving one country for another will always leave you longing for a paradise, which is never the same as in your dreams.”

Other awards included the Best Pitch Award, which entails coverage throughout the project’s life-cycle, including a special feature-format focus in Screen International - this went to Estonian project Erik Stoneheart by producer Evelin Soosaar-Penttila and director Ilmar Raag.

The Clear Light Award, worth €5,000 in LED lighting services by Estonian company Digital Sputnik, went to Motherland as well. The Producers’ Network Awards - free passes to the 2016 Cannes Film Market for the two most promising producers, courtesy of the Marché du Film – went to Gary Cranner of Chezville (Norway) and Johanna Aust of Flickfilm (Germany). Find out more about the BE Co-Production Market projects here.

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