Match Me! (7-9 August), Locarno Pro’s networking platform for up-and-coming producers, places company-building squarely alongside project development. Here, the following seven participants (out of a total of 36) present their production identities, the work currently driving their slates, the financing already assembled and the partners required for the next stage.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Amadeu Alban – Movioca (Brazil)
Alban represents Movioca, a Brazilian content house whose credits span film, television and internationally exported formats. Its principal project is The Girl Who Bled Woman, a survival thriller and coming-of-age drama based on the screenwriter’s family history.

In rural Brazil, 13-year-old Dinha is forced to marry her widowed brother-in-law and begins hiding her first menstruation to delay consummation. Budgeted at €3 million in the Locarno materials, the feature is in early development, with its fourth screenplay treatment under way. Alban estimates that roughly 60% could be covered through Brazilian public funds, and he is seeking international co-producers and financing, particularly connections with Portugal and Galicia.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Mikkel Smidt – Napkin Productions (Denmark)
Founded in 2025 by six graduates of the National Film School of Denmark’s producing programme, Napkin Productions develops fiction, documentary and hybrid work. Smidt is presenting Rosa Lie’s San Luca, a €500,000 hybrid documentary in early development.

Boys raised within Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta play fictionalised versions of themselves, exposing how organised crime enters Europe’s green-energy economy and launders public money through wind farms. The project was selected for Nordic Talents 2025 and has a Danish Film Institute development application pending. Napkin is primarily seeking an Italian co-producer, alongside further partners and financing.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Hadi Nikzad – Lumina Films (Finland)
Nikzad’s Helsinki-based Lumina Films focuses on socially resonant arthouse cinema rooted in Nordic, migrant and diasporic experience. Dor – Dissidents of the Republic, helmed by Bahar Pars, follows an Iranian-Finnish novelist in Helsinki who believes she is under surveillance before discovering that the threat lies closer than expected.

The €1.9 million paranoid thriller is in development with no financing yet in place. Lumina is seeking Swedish, Norwegian and Mediterranean co-production partners able to support a film about exile, trust, political violence and the erosion of domestic intimacy.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Alec Barth – counterintuitive film (Germany)
Barth founded counterintuitive film to develop formally adventurous international work. Gali Blay’s Electric Water is a 90-minute animated coming-of-age adventure combining 2D animation for the human world with stop-motion puppetry to depict the environment beneath the sea.

After a whale washes ashore, young Thala joins a marine expedition and discovers that legal systems – and her own family – are implicated in the destruction of the ocean. Budgeted at between €4 million and €5 million, the project is in development and scriptwriting. Barth is seeking Mediterranean co-producers, broadcasters and commissioning editors.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Camilla Gazzola – Amartia Film (Italy)
The Naples-based company is presenting Francesco Pascucci’s Reborn, an 80-minute documentary examining people who form maternal bonds with hyper-realistic dolls in a world of growing loneliness.

Updated information supplied by Gazzola places the budget at €150,000, and identifies Amartia Film and Belgium’s Harald House as the only production companies currently attached; the French company previously listed should not be mentioned at this stage. The project is in development, with €7,000 in place, and is looking for sales companies and broadcasters.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Julia Jendrysik – Rizz Films (Poland)
Rizz Films is making headway with two Polish-Czech projects. Marta Ojrzyńska’s Mother Daughter, adapted from Mira Marcinów’s novel, is a €500,000 drama with 88% of its financing confirmed and production under way. It has been presented at Polish Days and is supported by the Mazovia and Warsaw Film Fund. Its difficult mother-daughter bond, humour and recurring bee motif transform grief and family trauma into poetic drama.

Tomasz Wróbel’s Komputer, meanwhile, is a €940,000 psychological thriller with science-fiction elements about a Warsaw engineer in 1969 who turns to an increasingly intelligent proto-chatbot. The latter has 5% confirmed through the Polish Film Institute. Rizz is seeking co-producers, distributors and sales partners.

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Andreia Nunes – Wonder Maria Filmes (Portugal)
Nunes’ Lisbon-based company is developing Ary Zara’s Sol em Saturno, a €1.2 million drama with approximately 2% financed, and Fernanda Polacow and João Nuno Pinto’s Oriana, a family feature inspired by a Portuguese children’s classic.

The latter follows an 11-year-old who believes she is a fairy and leads her friends into a mysterious forest. New Portuguese support has brought roughly 35% of its €2.3 million budget into place. Produced with Italy’s Albolina Film and with a shoot planned for summer 2028, Oriana is seeking a third international co-producer, broadcasters, sales agents and distributors; Sol em Saturno is looking for co-producers, financing and sales.