02/04/2019 - The second workshop of the 2018/19 School for Film Agents programme is taking place in Tbilisi, while the deadline for project proposals for the next edition is 29 May

Following the first workshop of its 2018/19 edition in Warsaw in August last year (see the news), the second module of the School of Film Agents (SOFA) training programme is taking place from 1-6 April in Tbilisi.

After Warsaw’s focus on project development, participants Eva Brazdžionytė (Lithuania), Agnieszka Kruk (Poland), Victoria Leshchenko (Ukraine), Marat Parkhomovsky (Israel), Róbert Vámos (Hungary) and Natia Nikoleishvili (Georgia) will concentrate on digging deeper into the marketing aspects of their projects. In order to accomplish this, all of the participants will be supported by experienced professionals from the audiovisual industry, including Josef Reidinger (managing director of ARRI Media GmbH), Richard Naylor (director of BOP Consulting), Karin Schockweiler (deputy director of the Film Fund Luxembourg), Renaud Redien Collot (senior analyst at Institut Friedland), Juliane Schulze (Media Deals), Cornelius Ochman (director of the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation) and Jowe Harfouche (executive director of the Network of Arab Alternative Screens).

The programme will include two public events: one will be a conversation with Josef Reidinger on 4 April at 5pm; the second one, at noon on 5 April, will start with an introduction to the current state of the Georgian film industry, led by Tamara Tatishvili (Georgian film agent), followed by a mission statement by SOFA head of studies Nikolaj Nikitin and a final project presentation by the participants.

SOFA has also announced a new call for projects for the seventh edition of the initiative, set to take place in Warsaw (18-23 August 2019) and Tbilisi (25-30 April 2020). The selected SOFA projects will be invited to a third workshop focused on financing, scheduled to take place in Vilnius (17-21 September 2020). The deadline for project submission is 29 May 2019 – for more information, click here.

SOFA – School of Film Agents is a programme of workshops aimed at strengthening national film industries and the European cinematic landscape, as well as kick-starting projects in the realm of cinema. It is a joint project organised by Filmplus gUG (Berlin) and the Institute for Democratic Changes (Tbilisi), funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and the European Union’s Creative Europe – MEDIA programme. The company executing the Georgian workshop is Takes Film, with the support of local funding partners the Georgian National Film Center, the Ministry of Culture and Sport of Georgia and Enterprise Georgia (Film in Georgia). In addition, the 2019 Polish workshop will be funded by the Polish Film Institute, the SDPZ (Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation) and the Mazovia Warsaw Film Commission, and the Lithuanian session by the Lithuanian Film Centre. The organisers also wish to thank strategic partners the Goethe-Institut, EAVE and the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS).