GYM by Srdan Vuletic is shooting
In Production and in Post-production April 2023
In production
- THE BRUTALIST by Brady Corbet, co-producer: EAVE graduate Viktoria Petranyi is shooting. Adrien Brody will play “visionary” Hungarian architect Laszlo Toth, who, along with his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), is facing hardship and poverty as the couple attempt to establish themselves as immigrants in post-war America. But soon, Laszlo is sponsored by a “seemingly charming” industrialist to design a “grand modernist monument” that will be a pearl of the new urban skyline – a project that will push him and his marital bond to their limits. The film is an intricate co-production between several partners, headed by producers Trevor Matthews and Nick Gordon, of Brookstreet UK, and from the USA, Andrew Morrison of Yellow Bear, Andrew Lauren of Andrew Lauren Productions and DJ Gugenheim. Co-producing partners are the UK’s Intake Films and Hungary’s Proton Cinema. Further financing comes from Lip Sync Productions, Richmond Pictures, Meyohas Studio, Carte Blanche and the French production cashflow outfit Cofiloisirs.
- CYCHOSIS by Kari Vidø, producer: EAVE graduate Aleksi Hyvärinen is in production. Cychosis is based on the first book in a trilogy, which has received great international recognition and was the first Danish novel to be nominated for the French book prize “Le Prix des Incorruptibles”. According to the producers, the feature is “a dark and intense story about Lulu and Mads, who have both experienced something strongly supernatural. […] The meeting between them leads to a wild and risky search for answers with consequences for both of them. Raw realism merges with a supernatural universe.” CYCHOSIS is being produced by SF Studios in co-production with Finland’s Don Films, and with support from the Danish Film Institute, the Finnish Film Foundation, the Nordisk Film & TV Fond and TV2 Denmark. The picture is being filmed in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. Principal photography will wrap at the beginning of May.
- BLUE BANKS by Andreea Bortun, co-producer: EAVE graduate Jean-Laurent Csinidis is shooting. The screenplay, written by Borţun herself, follows Lavinia, a single mother who is trying to make a living for herself and her son, Dani, in a poor Romanian village. When she gets a job in Marseille, she has to leave Dani behind. While she’s away, he is left with endless possibilities, trying to figure out who he can become and orbiting around different male figures – his surrogate father, his biological one and his older best friend. Later, an unexpected event will force Lavinia to come back home. The director says that the exodus of people leaving Romania for better working conditions abroad has had a huge effect on her country’s society over the last two decades. While the material changes are obvious, she was more interested in the inner changes in the life of women in rural areas. “In 2018, I started to study the effects of this migration on the lives of women who had a history of working abroad. I realised it is not very often discussed how they perceive their home space when they come back on short visits, and how they need to deepen the roots they have here. I changed the perspective and examined how ‘home’ looks for the immigrant who comes back,” Bortun explains. The film will be shot over 47 days throughout the entire year, as the story covers all four seasons. The film is supported by the Romanian National Film Center. Blue Banks was developed at Less is More, First Films First and the Budapest Debut Film Forum. It was also presented in the CineLink Sarajevo, Venice Production Bridge and TIFF Industry Days programmes, winning the Transilvania Pitch Stop Award.
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- GYM by Srdan Vuletic, producer: EAVE graduate, group leader and Croatian National Coordinator Ankica Juric Tilic is shooting. GYM points to that eternal problem we are all trying to avoid admitting to ourselves: in everybody’s inner circle, there is that one idiot that you maybe should not be supporting. In Riki’s life it is his co-worker and brother-in-law-to-be Ado. The catering company they are both working for is about to close, and Ado decides that the best way to approach the problem is to just beat up the top notch cakemaker Melisa who left the company and make her work with them again. As the catering event where they will all meet approaches, Riki must decide what his part in this catastrophe will be. The Bosnian/Croatian/Slovenian/Montenegrin coproduction is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of Canton Sarajevo, BH Telecom, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, the Film Centre of Montenegro, the Slovenian Film Centre and the Lottery of Bosnia and Herzegovina supported the project so far. Principal photography started on 10 April 2023 and will last for 16 days. The film will be completely shot in Sarajevo, using the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina as its primary location.
- SILENT OBSERVERS by Eliza Petkova, producer: EAVE graduate Veselka Kiryakova is currently in production. The film explores life in the mountain village of Pirin through the eyes of a horse, a dog, a goat, a cat, and a mare. The secluded village of Pirin, where people and animals depend on each other to survive, is bound to disappear together with its centuries-old traditions. “My goal is to make a film where the viewer identifies with the animal characters and where the animal is presented as a subject revealing its individual soul to the camera. Our visual approach is an aesthetic that evokes the animals' perspective on their surroundings. What interests me is a story about a human community through the eyes of the animals in it”, director Eliza Petkova said. The Bulgarian/German co-production between Red Carpet and Wood Water Films was financed by the Bulgarian National Film Center and Eurimages, and it will have a version for cinema release and a TV version for AR/rbb, which are also supporting the production. The postproduction is scheduled for May 2023 - February 2024, with Eliza Petkova holding the editor's credit.
- KURTAG by Dénes Nagy, producer: EAVE graduate Julianna Ugrin is in production. Ninety-six years old in 2023, György Kurtag is one of today's best-known contemporary composers, the last major representative of the post-war avant-garde generation that included György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The film follows the acclaimed Hungarian composer György Kurtág throughout Europe. Although the physical limitations of his age are increasingly limiting the external framework of his daily life, his inner spiritual life remains extremely rich. “Kurtag is a film about a composer at the end of his life but still active, who lives his days in a wheelchair but also composes, plays piano and teaches; he is constantly present, inspired, living in and by music. The film is about his life's work and his life's journey, his thoughts and his thinking, but more importantly about the mysterious and complex relationship between life and the works he creates”, Dénes Nagy said. Principal photography started in Budapest, Paris, Vienna, London, Lugoj/Baile Herculane (Romania) in 2022, and continued in Reykjavik, Vienna and Budapest in 2023. Filming is still planned in Cornwall, Basel and Budapest. Julianna Ugrin is producing through Hungary’s Éclipse Film. The project received support from the National Film Institute – Hungary.
- HUNGER STRIKE BREAKFAST by Karolis Kaupinis, producer: EAVE graduate Marija Razgute is in production. The film tells a story of the employees of Lithuanian television during the Soviet takeover in 1991. Three TV journalists Daiva, Sigis and Mykolas, announce a hunger strike in front of the television building, aiming to recover the premises from the Soviet soldiers who occupy them. The hunger strike is getting huge public and media support, but inexperienced hunger strikers face other unforeseen challenges. HUNGER STRIKE BREAKFAST is produced by Marija Razgute through M-films in co-production with Czech Background Films and Latvia’s Tasse Film, with support from the Lithuanian Film Centre, the Czech Film Fund and Eurimages. MEDIA Creative Europe supported the development of the project. The film is shot mainly in Vilnius and Kaunas until May 2023 during 25 shooting days.
In post-production
- EXCURSION by Una Gunjak, producers: EAVE graduates Amra Baksic Camo (also National Coordinator Bosnia Herzegovina), Adis Dapo and Sinisa Juricic is in post-production. EXCURSION tells a story of a teenager Iman, who catches the eye of an older boy while her class is preparing for the excursion to celebrate the end of primary school. Rumour about her being pregnant puts the whole excursion in jeopardy, and Iman finds herself in the storm of expectations, limitations and rules that life of a teenager in Bosnia and Herzegovina brings with it. The film is a co-production between Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Norway and France and supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of Canton Sarajevo, Film Fund Sarajevo, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, Sorfond, Film Center Serbia, Hubert Bals Fund and Eurimages.
- APOCALYPSE CLOWN by George Kane, producer: EAVE graduate Morgan Bushe is in post-production. Described by the creative team as “a chaotic road trip of self-discovery”, Apocalypse Clown begins with the sudden death of international clown master Jean DuCoque, an event that brings together the film's motley trio: Bobo, a hobo clown who has hit rock bottom; Pepe, a talentless mime; and Funzo, an inadvertently terrifying “street clown”. After a mass brawl at the funeral, involving some vengeful human statues, earns them a night in jail, the group emerges to find a country suddenly plunged into anarchy overnight by a major solar flare. No power. No internet. No one is safe. Lugging around DuCoque's stiffening corpse, this band of unlikely heroes escape with The Great Alphonso, a pompous ex-TV celebrity, and Jenny Malone, a clickbait reporter with a head full of ambition, conspiracy theories and “mammy issues”. They venture cross-country in Bobo's jalopy in search of answers. After taking refuge from the pursuing human statues with revellers from a now-abandoned boutique micro-festival, Alphonso spots his chance to resurrect his career and reclaim the fame he so desperately craves. Ditching the others, Alphonso dupes Jenny into helping him steal an analogue TV transmitter. By the time Bobo, Pepe and Funzo track them down, Alphonso has amassed an army of feral children and is broadcasting increasingly deranged clown shows from an abandoned big top. Desperate times call for desperate measures. In order to escape with their lives, Bobo, Pepe and Funzo are forced to put their differences aside and put on a clown show capable of earning the approval of the toughest audience of their careers... It's time for Bobo's nigh-impossible routine: “The Jugglenaut”. They've all died on stage before – but this time it could actually be fatal. Producer EAVE graduate Morgan Bushe added: “George, the writers and our amazing cast have really created something completely unique with this film. Like Beckett with added Stiller, there's certainly never been an Irish film like it, and I think audiences are going to really love journeying with our unhinged, dysfunctional troupe of clowns on their quest to save the world, and their careers in the process. Buckle up for a roller-coaster ride of comedy chaos.” APOCALYPSE CLOWN is being produced by Fastnet Films (Ireland), Namesake Films (UK) and uMedia (Belgium). The project's funders include Screen Ireland, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, RTÉ, Vertigo Releasing, the Irish Tax Credit, the Belgian Tax Shelter and BCP Asset Management.
Page published 28 April 2023.
