- INFO
CineLink 2005
Well, let us repeat: CineLink is a project aimed at developing scenarios, and a co-production market targeting film projects from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. This is its third edition.
After two years, we have our first realized project. The film «Totally Personal» by Nedžad Begović is finished and it had its premiere at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. I must admit that it feels great. When you know a project from its inception; when you know all its author's dilemmas and all its producer's plans, to watch the finished film has an extra dimension. Next year there will be, it seems, several more finished projects, several more new and interesting experiences.
Every year brings new stories, new authors, followed always by a new question – what is it that is shared by all these projects, what, at the level of ideas, is our regional cinema?
Ten CineLink projects this year do not offer a ready answer. Ten completely different stories, ten new and diverse artistic poetics, and ten different production plans. The minimalist story by Ognjen Sviličić about Armin, a boy from Bosnia who travels with his father to Zagreb to the casting for a German war film. Zornica Sofija's search for an answer to the question: what is Balkans? An American road movie by Goran Rušinović and Miljenko Jergović… Still, after having read them all one finds an interesting matrix, a common substance. All the stories which have applied this year are part of the same world; they are about contemporary life with references to past that correlate as if the correlation is made deliberately. Some of the projects are future debuts (Baby Photo, Two of us, Vesna Ćudić), some of them are future works of authors who have numerous films already behind them (Estrelita by Metod Pevec, Kino Lika by Dalibor Matanić), while some will be second feature films by the authors who have attracted interest from both audience and critics with their first ones (Jemin by Srđan Vuletić).
Unlike the first year, when projects were clearly marked in terms of the nation they came from and when Cine-Link was their first attempt to find co-producers and international collaborators, this time we have the projects that emerge as both authors' and international co-production (Rušinović-Jergović, Pevec-Sidran), that - in terms of production - already found partners in the countries of our region. Looking at this year's list, it looks like the co-production has become the way of thinking here as well, rather that the way to find easier and more successfully the funding for the films.
Several days ago, a colleague from Sarajevo asked me to find out how much are his colleagues paid in other countries of the region – for comparison sake. In ten minutes, I had a comparative overview, a study, that is, on production costs in the region. This is also one of the results of CineLink, and that fact that there are now colleagues who are just a telephone call away.
Amra Bakšić Čamo
Head of CineLink project
