Foundation offers Calling Card for emerging young talent
by Annika Pham
The Finnish Film Foundation (FFF) has just launched the Calling Card scheme, its own version of the Danish Film Institute’s New Danish Screen, to support young and up-and-coming filmmakers.
The new scheme supervised by Joona Louhivuori, Short Film Commissioner at the FFF, has a total budget of €1.5m that has to be used by the end of September 2011. The Foundation’s key objective is to support the production of short films that could be used as “calling cards” for emerging professionals, but feature-length projects will also be considered under certain conditions. At least 30% of the support must be spent on wages of people under the age of 30.
As part of its first round of support, the FFF allocated €175,000 in development and production grants and €25,000 in scriptwriting grants. Supported projects included Antti Pesonen’s Tsägäateria, a six-minute dark comedy set in a hamburger joint, produced by Making Movies; and Variation, a 12-minute sci-fi drama by Sebastian Barner-Rasmussen, produced by Talvi International.
Louhivuori says the Foundation is also looking into the possibility of creating an Internet site to distribute Finnish short films and Calling Card projects.
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