Baltic Event Brings Film Pros To Tallinn

by Sandy Mandelberger, North American Editor

Straying a little bit from my regular beat covering European cinema in the North American market, I am at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. The huge event with over 250 films screening from around the world, includes a number of strong industry initiatives under the umbrella title of BALTIC EVENT.

BALTIC EVENT is the largest regional film market, bringing together film distributors, financiers, film festival reps and other professionals to meet the Baltic film industry. Comprised of seminar panels, one-on-one networking opportunities and a dedicated Market screenings sidebar, BALTIC EVENT brings together intriguing, challenging, and promising projects with the best producers from the region and representatives of international sales and distribution companies.

The Baltic Event Co-Production Market is showcasing twelve new film projects in the development phase and gives their producers an opportunity to pitch and propose collaborations with a host of film professionals from all across Europe. The Market is set up around one-to-one meetings between project representatives and potential financiers. All meetings are organized by the Market team in advance, so that a producer can have as many as a dozen meetings in one day to pitch their projects. Participants this year include production outfits from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Romania, Albania, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and Finland.

New this year is the Black Market Industry Screenings, which presents industry-only presentations of newly completed films. This year's crop of films include entries from Armena, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Norway, Romania, Finland, Tajikstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Russia.

Another new initiative is the Coming Soon program, which screens trailers of Baltic film projects in post-production, with the aim of bringing them to the attention of sales agents and distributors before they hit the film festival circuit. This first peek gives motivated buyers a look at the exciting films from the region that will be making waves in 2010.

Sales agents, distributors, film festival directors and producers participating in the three-day parallel market events include representatives from Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Bosnia Herzigovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Latvia, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tadzhikistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States and Uzbekistan.

For more information on these events, visit: www.poff.ee/balticevent