17/11/2008

Eight projects with budgets ranging from €300,000 to €1.8m, are competing for the Production Awards of the Development Programme of the TorinoFilmLab, to be given out at the upcoming Meeting Event (November 23-24), during the Turin Film Festival (TFF).

There are four first time and four second-time directors vying for the awards (worth an overall €600,000 although the number of prizes will be decided upon by the advisory board). First up are twin brothers Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, who not only come from Turin but have had their last five shorts presented at TFF. Moreover, their first feature, Sette opere di Misericordia, in which the lives of two dropouts change after the kidnapping of a child, is also set in Turin.

Other debut directors include France’s Betrand Mandrico (who has made numerous music videos and is at the Lab with The Man Who Hides the Forest) and two women: Katrin Olafsdottir, who will shoot Home Away From Home in her native Iceland and on the Canary Islands, and Paz Fábrega, from Costa Rica, who after studying in London will make her debut (with French funding), Agua fría de mar.

After the success (mostly critical, and mostly outside of Italy) of The Gift [+see also:
trailer
film profile] , Michelangelo Frammartino is preparing his second film, Le quattro volte. As ambitious as the first, it once again blends fiction and documentary and is set in Calabria.

The other directors have already starting making names for themselves, beginning with Thailand’s Aditya Assarat, a winner at Rotterdam with Wonderful Town whose new High Society looks at the feelings of loss of a generation that can no longer be defined on the basis of nationality.

Last, but not least, are projects from two cosmopolitan talents from the stable of producer Paulo Branco (who produced both their debuts): Punta del Este, by Juan Pittaluga, an Uruguayan director of Spanish descent who lives in France; and Red Cross, by Portuguese director Hugo Vieira da Silva, who lives in Berlin.

(Translated from Italian)