For the first time in history of the New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival which will be held this year on 6-13 October there will be organized a new project called KINOLABORATORIA specifically made with the support of Hennessy Perspectives for those directors, producers and script writers who only begin the career in the film industry.
On 7-10 October the participants will introduce their projects in progress and will attend some lectures and workshops in order to master their skills. Only 8 projects were selected out of 180 applications, and KINOLABORATORIA generally has received a huge response in Russia. The projects have a vast geography, from Paris to Abkhazia. The authors of two best projects will receive 500 000 rubles for their further development and the winner will be awarded by 3 000 000 rubles for the full production of the short film. The team will also be provided with a series of consultations before applying for international festivals.
The mentors of KINOLABORATORIA are widely known experts of the industry. Among them there is a screenwriter, script consultant and film editor Matthieu Taponier; a story editor and script writer Nadja Dumouchefl; an independent film producer and the founder and managing director of Athens-based production company Horsefly Film Yorgos Tsourgiannis; a cultural manager and film programme Sarah Schlüssel; a short film programmer at IndieLisbo and director of Portugal Film - Portuguese Film Agency Margarita Moz; the lead editor of Non-Stop Production Anton Toktonov and the head of the fiction and documentary film department at Stereotactic studio Sergey Yahontov.
KINOLABORATORIA selection 2021
Antisexus
Director: Dina Karaman
In the middle of a far-away steppe there is a dead pink lake inhabited by a radiant flying hole that pesters the salt works employees with propositions regarding the Antisexus electromagnetic device.
Dva
Director: Alexandra Karelina
During a state of emergency, a lonely unemployed guy finds himself travelling around the city in a bid to understand the meaning of abstract instructions sounding out from loudspeakers. He finds a place where reality is split in two and it forces the events to be repeated.
Kolka
Director: Sonya Petrenko
An essay-film that reflects on the life in the mountains of Northern Ossetia after the surge of the Kolka glacier in 2002. Elements of ecological, social, cultural and political realities are layered to draw the complex fenomena that take its rise in the Karmadon Gorge.
Little Blue Light
Director: Maxim Pechersky
A group of queers replays and performs sketches from the history of Russian masculinity in the studio set up for the “Goluboy Ogonyok” (eng. “Little Blue Light”) New Year’s TV show.
Marron, pas Blanc
Directors: Egor Shevchenko, Rinat Bek
A troubled night in the life of the family of Ukrainian immigrants in Parisian suburbs.
Phytocontrol
Director: Alexey Mikhaylov
Suffering from the loss of his son, Oleg moves to Romania, but he fails to cross the border, as phytosanitary control does not let him in with a pot flower, he planted on the day his son was born. Oleg returns to his native town and happens to meet a boy who becomes his son for just one day.
Scarab
Director: Daur Ladaria
Milana loses her memory for no reason. She no longer knows her parents, sisters, her own husband, who do not believe in her illness. She will have to listen to her hometown, and save the once lost neighbors; children in its abandoned coal mines, or again become a hostage of her past life at the behest of the family.
The Invisibles
Director: Sofia Lipatova
Seventeen-year-old Valya is going through her first-ever breakup with her girlfriend Lisa. Lisa is getting married in two days. Valya finds this hard to accept. Her problems at school and quarrels with her mother put Valya in a vise. Her world crumbles. She decides to come to Lisa's wedding.
KINOLABORATORIA MENTORS 2021
Matthieu Taponier is a screenwriter, script consultant and film editor. After completing a MFA in filmmaking at New York University, he received script consultant training from the TorinoFilmLab’s Script&Pitch program. He has been tutoring since in workshops such as the Critic’s Week “Next Step”, DFI’s “Hezayah Screenwriting Lab” and Le Groupe Ouest’s “LIM - Less is More”. He collaborated as a script and film editor on Son of Saul by László Nemes (Grand Prix Cannes 2015, Golden Globe, Oscar and BAFTA 2016); as a co-writer and film editor on Nemes’ Sunset (FIPRESCI Venice 2018); as a script and film editor on Beginning by Dea Kulumbegashvili (Cannes 2020, FIPRESCI TIFF 2020, Golden Shell San Sebastian 2020).
Nadja Dumouchel is a script writer and story editor based in Berlin. Nadja studied
visual culture in Brighton, journalism and literature in Berlin and cinema in Valencia. She was trained as a story editor at Torino Film Lab and has since then been working on scripts from all over the world on a freelance basis. She is consulting and tutoring for various filmlabs such as Torino Film Lab, Next Step run by Semaine de la Critique and European Short Pitch. She is also co-founder of and script consultant at « La Scénaristerie », a development hub for screenwriters based in Paris. She previously worked as a programmer and commissioning editor for ARTEs short film magazine Court-Circuit in 2008. In September 2013 she started giving scriptwriting classes at the Strasbourg University and now teaches at Filmakademie Ludwigsburg in Germany as well as, since 2020, at Filmuniversität Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg.
Yorgos Tsourgiannis is an independent film producer and the founder and managing director of Athens-based production company Horsefly Films. His credits include All The Pretty Little Horses, by Michalis Konstantatos, Emin Alper’s third feature film A Tale of Three Sisters, Yiannis Veslemes’s Norway, Luton by Michalis Konstantatos, and Dogtooth by Yorgos Lanthimos, which premiered in Cannes, (the Un Certain Regard prize in Festival de Cannes, the Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film). He is currently working on the development of the debut feature film of Efthimis Kosemund Sanidis, That Burning Light and on the fourth feature film of Emin Alper Balkaya. Yorgos Tsourgiannis has been teaching feature film development at the Fine Arts Department of the Thessaloniki Aristotle University and the film production module at SAE Athens. He is a member of ACE Producers, an EFP Producers on The Move 2010 alumnus, a member of the board of the Hellenic Film Academy and a member of the European Film Academy.
Sarah Schlüssel is a cultural manager and film programmer based in Berlin. She coordinates the Short Form Station of Berlinale Talents, is a member of the Berlinale Shorts selection committee, and co-founded shorts/salon, a series of curated short film programmes and talks. She is also part of the team of Pictoplasma, a platform for contemporary character design and art.
Margarida Moz is short film programmer at IndieLisboa - International Film Festival, and director of Portugal Film - Portuguese Film Agency, a distribution company which represents Portuguese short and feature films worldwide. Margarida holds a Master degree in Social Anthropology and has worked in films for the past 20 years, both in documentary research and production, and collaborating with several film festivals in Portugal.
Anton Toktonov is an editor and creative producer, and holds a PhD in philology. He is the lead editor at Alexander Rodnyansky and Sergey Melkumov’s production company Non-Stop Production. He has worked on numerous feature-length films including Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole, Nikolay Khomeriki’s The Ninth and Danila Kozlovsky’s Chernobyl: Abyss, and series such as Symphony No. 7, Doctor Richter and many more. He was the joint organiser of the first and second rounds of series pitches at the Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival.
Sergey Yahontov is head of the fiction and documentary film department at Stereotactic studio. He graduated from Moscow State Linguistic University. He is the producer and executive producer of several films including Ruslan Bratov's Merry-Go-Round, which received the Special Prize at FilmFestival Cottbus and the Grand Prize at the Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival, Petr Fedorov’s Electric Current, Anna Melikyan’s 8, Aleksei German Jr.'s Tokyo and many others. He worked as production manager on Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil: Retribution.