02/11/2021 - Filmmakers Thorsten Klein, Kieron J Walsh, Kaltrina Krasniqi, Darko Sinko, Fred Baillif and Selman Nacar, and producers Lena Vurma and Nynne Selin Eidnes are set for the showcase on 13 November

Director Kaltrina Krasniqi, whose project Bleach has been selected (© Vera Films)

Unfolding within the context of the 22nd Arras Film Festival (running 5 – 14 November – read our article), the 10th edition of Arras Days will unveil seven projects which are currently in the process of being written and which, on Saturday 13 November, are due to be pitched to a jury of three professionals (the outgoing artistic director of Critics’ Week Charles Tesson, the director of the European Film Market Dennis Ruh and producer Dominique Welinski), with two development grants up for grabs (funded by the festival and the City of Arras). Also conceived of as a co-production and funding platform, Arras Days will also provide producers, distributors and sales agents who are interested in these projects with an opportunity to discover them in situ.

The projects are as follows:

Leonora in the Morning Light - Thorsten Klein (Germany)
Production: Lena Vurma (Dragonfly Films)
This new project by the director of Adventures of a Mathematician [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] is an adaptation of Elena Poniatowska’s best-selling novel Leonora, whose story looks back on the unusual path taken by surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.

Skintown - Kieron J Walsh (Ireland)
The director of Jump [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The Racer [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kieron J Walsh
film profile] will be attending Arras Days with his project, which revolves around two teenagers trapped at the centre of the violence engulfing Northern Ireland in the 1990s, who try to escape their plight by making money selling ecstasy to paramilitaries who are organising a rave.

Bleach - Kaltrina Krasniqi (Kosovo)
Discovered in this year’s Orizzonti section in Venice by way of Vera Dreams of the Sea [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kaltrina Krasniqi
film profile], this filmmaker will pitch her new project which follows a young fifty-something mother and wife who has spent her life working as a cleaner in other people’s homes and who decides to offer her skills to a city company directed by a charismatic forty-something woman, who leads her to believe they’re almost friends. Until, one day, an incident unfolds…

Confirmation - Darko Sinko (Slovenia)
The story of this new film put forward by the director discovered in this year’s New Directors competition in San Sebastián via Inventory [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Darko Sinko
film profile], delves into a small village in the Slovenian countryside where everyone is getting ready for a religious confirmation ceremony, notably three teenage friends Mate, Peter and Gaber. But a stupefying discovery inside the church totally transforms their outlook…

Black Like Jesus - Fred Baillif (Switzerland)
The director who won multiple awards this year with The Fam [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fred Baillif
film profile] (crowned within Berlin’s Berlinale Generation line-up, as well as in Zurich and Namur, and nominated for the European Films Discovery Award 2021) is scheduled to pitch his new project whose story revolves around Buda, a young teenager from London, with Rwandan roots, who’s lost in a tumultuous search for self, caught between gangs, dance, the meaning of life, the past and the present…

Hesitation Wound - Selman Nacar (Turkey)
Another director who recently turned heads in San Sebastián’s New Directors competition, this time by way of Between Two Dawns [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Selman Nacar
film profile], will present his project homing in on a lawyer who finds herself wrestling with her conscience on the last day of a hearing which is set to rule on the fate of a murder suspect whom she believes to be innocent and whom she has been defending for some time.

Under Pressure (Denmark)
Production: Nynne Selin Eidnes (First Lady Film)
The producer whose recent output includes Erna at War [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Henrik Ruben Genz
film profile] will be pitching her latest project, examining the unforeseeable consequences of a tragic encounter between a midwife and a couple who are expecting their first child…

(Translated from French)