31/01/2006

With new talents in mind, last June, TVP, the Ministry of Culture and the Polish Directors' Association agreed to launch the '30 minutes' programme to grant 250,000 euros (a million zlotys) to young directors for their first fiction films (of up to 30 minutes - read news 6/15). This initiative elaborated at Andrzej Wajda's staging school consists in supporting up to ten short films by young filmmakers per year. The candidates (who do not have to have graduated at a film school) can get up to 25,000 euros (100,000 zlotys). TVP Kultura (the cultural public channel) handles the distribution and promotion of the selected projects.

While this programme is primarily designed to make up for a lack of short films in Poland, another programme, also created at Wajda's school and entitled EKRAN, focuses on the production of features by authors who have already made one or several short films. EKRAN is technically a training programme but in practice, by providing artistic assistance from the writing of the script to the actual production, it indirectly participates to the financing process (read news 11/2). In fact, like many training programmes supported by MEDIA, EKRAN is a cheap way of developing a project very nicely!