Next 3 July, the 2nd CinEuro Prize will be awarded – a development fund supporting one fiction project (up to €30,000) and one documentary project (up to €15,000) that feature stories, characters or settings deeply anchored in the territories of the network. CinEuro is a cross-border network of almost 40 organisations supporting the cinema and audiovisual sector in France, Luxemburg, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. Last year, the Grand Est Region, the Film Fund Luxembourg, the Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg, the Saarland Medien GmbH, the Ministerium für Familie, Frauen, Kultur und Integration Rheinland-Pfalz, Wallimage, screen.brussels, Wallonie-Bruxelles International and the Ministerium der Deutschsprachigen Gemeinschaft Belgiens launched the CinEuro Prize together, joined this year by the Eurométropole of Strasburg. The two 2023 winners, as a reminder, were A main levée by Noha Choukrallah on the fiction side, and Le Dernier soin by Nicolas Gayraud on the documentary side.

Two documentaries are in the running for the award this year. First, the Luxembourgish project Capitale(s) Europe, la bataille des sièges by Alexis Metzinger, a political and media saga that retraces 70 years of disappointed ideals and secret negotiations, devastating declarations and twists and turns, and asks: should we have a unique and efficient capital, or should we disseminate institutions instead in order to bring them closer to the population? The second project, Legenda by Julien Kartheuser, explores the way in which the Latvian region of Courland has been marked by the burial of more than 300,000 bodies of Russian army soldiers at the end of the Second World War.

In parallel, five fiction projects are in the running. Comment je m’appelle by Frank Beauvais and Elsa Charbit aims to be a biopic of an unknown woman, one like so many others, from the 1950s to the present day – a woman who’s tried to become herself despite the roles that were assigned to her. As for Paul Vincent de Lestrade, he is developing Helter Skelter, the story of a teenage girl raised by her father who is a member of a nationalist extremist group. Three historical films have also been pre-selected. Clyde Gates and Gabriel Sanson are working on Le Météorologue, which follows Joseph, a meteorologist in the French army in October 1916. Wounded to the head during a reconnaissance mission, he is captured by the enemy. He finds himself taken to a weather station far from the front where the scientific community has only one goal: to control the rain. Another time and another war for Schweizer Kühe by Matthias Dinter, who takes us to the south of Germany in 1945, in the small town of Hemmingen, occupied by French troupes, where Paul, a 10-year-old boy, imagines a scheme to save the village cows from being confiscated by the Muslim North African soldiers. He will strike a friendship with a French army officer, Aziz. Finally, we go back in time with Les Danseurs de Strasbourg by Zoé Labasse, who looks at the strange dance epidemic that spread in the city in July 1518, and at the fate of a young woman, the assistant to an old surgeon, who sees in the chaos of this situation her opportunity to finally practise dissection…

The projects:

Capitale(s) Europe, la bataille des sièges - Alexis Metzinger
Production: Tarantula Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Co-production: Cerigo Films (France)

Legenda - Julien Kartheuser
Production: Backes Production (Belgium)
Co-production: We-Difi Media Gbr (Germany)

Comment je m’appelle - Frank Beauvais and Elsa Charbit
Production: Les Films du Bélier and Les Films Hatari (France)
Co-production: a-BAHN (Luxembourg)

Helter Skelter - Paul Vincent de Lestrade
Production: Need Productions (Belgium)
Co-production: Tripode Productions (France)

Le Météorologue - Clyde Gates and Gabriel Sanson
Production: L’Heure d’été (France)
Co-production: Seum Pictures (Belgium)

Schweizer Kühe - Matthias Dinter
Production: FFL Film - und Fernseh-Labor (Germany)
Co-production: Tellfilm (Switzerland)

Les Danseurs de Strasbourg - Zoé Labasse
Production: Avenue B Productions and Kalpa Films (France)
Co-production: Frakas Productions (Belgium)