TFL Selections & Awards
TFL Audience Design Fund 2019: discover the winners!
July 10, 2019
We are delighted to unveil the names of the 3 international co-productions that will receive the support of the TFL Audience Design Fund 2019.
Two fiction feature films and one creative documentary will receive a € 40.000 distribution grant to support the release in 3 territories and will also benefit from an Audience Design consultation session with TFL Experts to work on innovative strategies to reach audiences. The selected projects will also get exposure at the TFL Meeting Event 2019, TFL’s co-production forum attended by more than 200 Decision Makers.
The selection committee – consisting of TFL Audience Design Head of Studies and Creative Producer Valeria Richter (Denmark), TFL Production and Distribution Advisor Daniele Segre (Italy) and TFL Executive Director Savina Neirotti (Italy) –, has awarded the following projects:
CUBAN DANCER by Roberto Salinas (Italy, Chile, Canada) – Creative Documentary
Alexis is a young talented student of the National Ballet School of Cuba. Forced to emigrate with his parents to Miami, he will have to start again from scratch while facing many situations common to teenagers: rejection, loneliness and the difficulty of a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend. This intimate “coming of age” portrait uses some of the most iconic world events as a backdrop – President Obama’s visit to Cuba, the election of Donald Trump and the death of Fidel Castro, to name a few.
Currently in post-production, the film is produced by Indyca (Italy), Valdivia Film (Chile) and Megafun (Canada), in co-production with RAI Cinema (Italy). It is Roberto Salinas’ second feature film, after the acclaimed documentary THE TROUBLEMAKER, BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE UNITED NATIONS (Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano – La Havana, 2015).
HOGAR by Maura Delpero (Argentina, Italy) – Fiction Feature Film
Set in an Italian religious center for teen mothers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, HOGAR explores the life of three different women called to reckon with the various nuances of motherly love. A “fictional film based on a real documentary situation”, HOGAR will be Delpero’s first fiction feature-length film.
The film is produced by Campo Cine (Argentina), dispàrte (Italy) and Vivo film (Italy), in co-production with RAI Cinema (Italy). Currently in post-production, the project received the ARTE International Prize at San Sebastián Film Festival 2016 and will be presented at the BAM – Bogota Audiovisual Market on Thursday 11th of July, 2019, as a case study of the talk “Co-producing with Italy”, which will present tools and opportunities of making projects between Latin America and Italy.
LA NUIT DES ROIS by Philippe Lacôte (France, Ivory Coast, Canada) – Fiction Feature Film
Nightfall at MACA, one of the most overpopulated prisons in all of West Africa. A strange ritual is about to begin, that of “the Night of Roman”: a 17-year old boy is chosen by the prisoners to tell a story until dawn, in a nod at the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.
LA NUIT DES ROIS is the second feature film of Philippe Lacôte (RUN, Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard 2014). Produced by Banshee Films (France), Wassakara (Ivory Coast) and Peripheria (Canada), the project was developed in TFL ScriptLab 2016 under the title ZAMA and received the support of Eurimages in June 2019. The shooting is scheduled for September 2019.
“We were thrilled to receive so many applications from all over the world”, explain the members of the Selection Committee. “We were impressed by the diversity of the projects and by their strength, not only artistically – in terms of themes, characters and conflicts – but also in relation to Audience Design. The film teams presented some very interesting and creative ideas that constitute a promising basis for the further development of audience engagement strategies and outreach”.
“We are glad to support a project from Africa, written and directed by a very talented TFL Alumnus, Philippe Lacôte, who developed his story with TorinoFilmLab in 2016. A major novelty this year was the opening of the call to all cinema forms – fiction, animation and documentary: in 2019, we will for the first time support a creative documentary, which is a really exciting genre to work with, as documentaries have a longer history of experimenting with audience engagement and online distribution. This broadens the perspective of the fund”.
Launched in 2014, the TFL Audience Design Fund has already supported 15 feature film projects, including festival favorites FÉLICITÉ (Alain Gomis, Berlinale 2017 – Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize), BIRDS OF PASSAGE (Ciro Guerra & Cristina Gallego, Cannes’s Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2018) and A LAND IMAGINED (Yeo Siew Hua, Locarno Film Festival 2018 – Golden Leopard). It is made possible by the Creative Europe – MEDIA sub-programme support to International Co-production Funds.