01 It It has already received script funding from the German Federal Film Board (FFA) and is being planned as a trilateral co-production.
which garnered the awards for best production and direction at the German Cinema new talent awards in 2022.Canadian producer Joe Balass of Montreal-based Compass Productions was in Munich to present Bruce LaBruce’s
Mother Mary and look for co-producers and financiers as well as discuss the possibility of shooting outside of Canada. Balass said the love story between two misfits from very different backgrounds – a transwoman and a unmarried pregnant 19-year-old – was “loosely inspired” by such films as A Taste Of Honey
and Juno.
Source: Sophie Mahler / Munich Int’l Film FestivalFilmmakers at Munich’s CineCoPro Conference 2024The screenplay is being co-written by the trans actress and novelist Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay who had a role in LaBruce’s 2020 film Saint-Narcisse.Best Friends Forever is attached as international sales agent to Mother Mary
will be Compass Productions’ third collaboration with the director after his previous two feature films The Visitor and
Saint-Narcisse.There was also potential for a collaboration between Germany and Canada in the high-end TV series project
The Bomb presented in Munich by Roshanak “Rosh” Khadabakhsh of Port au Prince Pictures. The story of environmental activists travelling to French Polynesia in 1972 to stop an above-ground nuclear test on the Mururoa atoll subsequently led to the foundation of Greenpeace International thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Canadian environmentalist David McTaggart.Khadabakhsh revealed that Call Me By Your Name producer Paradise City is already onboard as a partner and she would now be looking for Canadian partners to join the project.Other projects presented at the pitching session included the meditative, archive-based documentary
The Golden Door, to be directed by Robindir Uppal and produced by Marc Serpa Francoeur of Toronto-based Lost Time Media, Berlin-based actress-producer-director Saralisa Volm’s dystopian drama At Sea
, based on Theresia Enzensberger’s eponymous novel, and Hamburg-based Canadian writer-director C. May Borgstrom’s psychological horror film Hour Of The Witch.Hour Of The Witch
will be Borgstrom’s second collaboration with the Hamburg production outfit Junafilm after her debut feature, the coming of age thriller Spirit In The Blood, which was made as a German-Canadian co-production with Canada’s Elevation PicturesThe third edition of the CineCoPro Conference brought 20 Canadian producers to Munich to meet and network with 20 of their German counterparts including Jakob Zapf (Neopol Film), Sebastian Weyland (Heimathafen Film), Ernestine Kahn (Kahnseiler Films) and Nina Frese (Wunderlust Films).Ukraine focusThe Munich festival gave five Ukrainian filmmakers including animator Roman Liubyi and directors Maryna Brodovska and Olga Chernykh an opportunity to present new projects to an audience of industry professionals.
Liubyi showed some teaser footage of his horror puppet animation Unholy Power, which will be targeted at children aged between eight to 10 and is based on Ukrainian folklore.The production by Babylon 13 already has Munich-based Benedetta Films onboard as a production partner. The
