Ten new projects were presented August 31 at B2B Doc Industry Days in the Polish city of Gdynia. The ongoing raison d’être of B2B Doc is to “contribute to the development of the film industry on the local level in our countries,” CEO Alex Shiriaieff underlined this week to BDE. The countries within the B2B Doc remit are Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The new works, nine of which BDE reports on here, are diverse in scope and subject, ranging from a lyrical essay on Polesia, a mystical region of Belarus, to a profile of the life and work of Turkey’s first professional female studio photographer, to a flea market in Yerevan. Elsewhere, a young queer boy fights homophobia in Georgia, while an Azeri filmmaker tells his country’s story whilst attempting to take a family portrait. In another Georgian project, a wheel-chair fencer refuses surgery so she can compete at the Paris Paralympics in 2024. And, of course, there are works that address head-on, and in highly cinematic fashion, aspects surrounding the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Azerbaijan filmmaker Nurlan Haslani’s THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER’S FAMILY PORTRAIT poses what turns out to be a tricky question to answer. How difficult can it really be for an amateur photographer to make a portrait of his large extended family?
In the film Nurlan is the photographer in question. But bringing together his real family members proves to be much more challenging than he imagined. Each visit to the family home presents a variety of situations and challenges. Throughout the process, the lives of these family members are intimately portrayed, revealing their individual aspirations and motivations. The grandfather, devotedly caring for his Alzheimer-stricken wife, is in search of a family grave. The father, having spent his life in apartment complexes, aspires to build a house with a garden. A younger brother, employed in post-war Karabakh, is the family’s main concern, and a male cousin from Generation Z strives to emigrate from his homeland. Behind the camera lens, Nurlan rediscovers his family and through them offers a revealing portrait of his country’s realities, the project notes read.
In his highly entertaining pitch, Nurlan explained how he was doing everything on this, so far self-funded, €15,000 film – even producing it. “I love telling stories. I know how to find and to play with them, but I’m really not good at financing, even writing a budget,” he conceded. “So I need a producer to help me to finance this film, to finish this film…As my grandmother says in the trailer, God will help me to make this film, but because of I’m not sure of the existence of God, I will need your assistance as well,” he implored the B2B Doc audience.
The response to the project was very positive, with Sundance’s Sundeep Sharma noting how, “the energy and the humour is really appealing, and I think that you as a creator is obviously what would sell it…I know it’s very early stages, but it’s something that I think would be very interesting to international festivals.”
Heleen Gerritsen of goEast suggested that if Nurlan were to bring on a producer, then this should be in post-production, so as not to upset the delicate balance within the family. Meanwhile Peter Stockhaus of Déjà-vu Film, Germany, suggested it should not be an 80-minute feature, rather a short film. “Do it as a short film. You will be so successful. You will conquer the world,” he advised.
Ukrainian Zoya Laktionova’s ASHES SETTLING IN LAYERS ON THE SURFACE is based on diaries and photographs found in houses destroyed during the Russian war against Ukraine. The film captures the stories of Mariupol, “with a focus on the value of freedom and human life itself,” the synopsis reads.
“This film is a personal story,” Laktionova commented in Gdynia. “However, I can tell a bigger story about the nation and the country that has been through tragedy and death, but is still place that I belong to and love. I want to explore how the personal story of my family interconnects with the story of the city and the nation. I want to investigate how things imprinted me from my previous generations.”
“My grandfather was taken by force by Soviet authorities from his native village in the western Ukraine to rebuild the Azovstal plant in Mariupol. He worked there all his life. My mother became a crane operator and [also] worked all her life at the plant. My grandfather died under the construction crane that was operated by his daughter, and my mother. Despite this, Azovstal style was my playground and was supposed to be next generation’s,” Laktionova underlined. But that circle has now been broken, she added.
The €400,000 project (with €91,645 in place) is supported by, among other funding institutions, the IDFA Bertha Fund. Currently at development stage, the project has three countries on board, France, Slovenia, Ukraine. Laktionova islooking for distributors, TV channels, festivals, (pre)sales and an impact producer.
“We love this project,” said IDFA’s Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen. “Personally I really love when a filmmaker can tell that bigger story of a country but from a very personal point of view. That is what I admire and I can really see how you are trying – and you do that well – to find your voice, to tell this story because it’s not easy… It’s so sensitive and so personal, how to express that feeling. But I see you are making great progress, so I really applaud you for that. And I have a strong belief that this will become a very strong film.”
In Armenian Anahit Ghazarian’s FOTO GALATASARAY we will be taken on “a heartfelt journey through black and white photos and memories, uncovering the life and work of Turkey’s first professional female studio photographer and her remarkable contribution in a male-dominated field.”
That hitherto unknown artist was Maryam Shahinyan who died in 1996, leaving behind a vast collection of around 200,000 photographs, capturing over one million individuals, including images of marginalized groups such as “gays, lesbians, black people, monks, boxers, soldiers, artists, Christians as well as Muslim women who could only unveil their hijabs in the presence of other women.”
Filmmaker Ghazarian stresses how it is likely that Shahinyan, from an Armenian family, “was driven by her own experiences as part of a struggling minority, to take an interest in documenting other marginalized communities in 20thcentury Turkey.”
“I was born into a family with a very strong feminist mother, which is not a common thing for my country,” Ghazariantold the B2B Doc audience. “I grew up watching my mom taking photos, developing them at home. And that’s when I learned for the very first time about this female photographer. I was quite shocked. She was so much like my mother.”
The archive that Ghazarian accessed was found next to a garbage bin. There has only been one publication of Shahinyan’s works, the director notes, and even that reveals little about her personal life. “As a female artist and writer who encountered numerous obstacles, along the way I realized how hard it has been for Shahinyan to work in a male-dominated field and how unjust it is that her name was lost to history.”
The film is budgeted at €100,000 with €70,000 in place. A confirmed partner is the Cinema Center of Armenia. Ghazarian hopes to release her film in 2024.
“When I was shooting in Istanbul, I was lucky enough to meet and interview 18 people who knew her,” the director stressed of the family members, relatives and former customers she encountered. “The journey was not just a search, it was a revelation. I was lucky enough to see the iconic chair [used in Shahinyan’s portraits], and the stamp that she put on the underside of the photographs. And this quest became an emotional saga in a way, leading me from person to person, from photo to photo retrospectively to collect and recreate her personality. And I think that this documentary will be the final step of my journey to discover her and to show my dedication to Shahinyan’s legacy. I made two podcast episodes. I created a website, I have written wrote different essays, and I have presented her work at the different international academic conferences.”
“I think after these many years and these many researches that I have done, I would say I have this feeling that it wasn’t me who found Shahinyan – it’s Shahinyan who found me.”
Another Armenian project in development is GROUNDING by Merri Mkrtchyan, scheduled for delivery in 2025. The logline describes how “an open-air market of old belongings in Yerevan turns into a cinematic microcosm where stories of visitors, sellers and curious objects of a Soviet past gradually paint a picture of modern-day Armenia.” Shot over the course of one year, “the director’s hand-held camera, keeps picking up plenty of remnants of a Soviet past scattered across the space and travels through its cultural memory by unravelling the stories behind them.”
Director Mkrtchyan elaborated on the €137,000 project to B2B Doc participants. “I was overwhelmed by this astonishing diversity of the market and people there, and it took me some real time in order to dive in this world of fragments and past attachments,” she said.
“In order to make sense of my quite addictive visits, I started to record voice messages addressed to a friend and share my thoughts and my insights that the place and the objects which carry certain memories would evoke in me. And my thoughts revolved around questioning how past influences have shaped our lives and what they have to do with the current state of the society that I live in, which is still facing a lot of emotional challenges affected by the ongoing conflict in the region, including the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh and the consequences of it.”
“The film follows multiple characters, both sellers and visitors, one of which is a Russian migrant Egor. And as he keeps walking and interacting in the market with different people, he somehow guides us in this place. And why a Russian as character? Well, because as the broke war broke out in Ukraine, thousands of Russians fled to Armenia. And Armenia is a country where less than 3 million people live. So a few thousand is quite a big number for us […] which is triggering a lot of discussion and is not very well welcome, especially by the young generation who expresses its anger and aggression towards this issue.”
Producer Yelizaveta Petrosyan underlined that the project is at the beginning of its development/production career. “We are working now on shaping the structure of the film with the challenge of dealing with multiple characters. And we are here to find funding opportunities for development, stage development workshops, and also co-producers who are willing and are interested in digging for gems in the market together with us.”
In Georgian Ana Kvichidze’s HEART DON’T BE AFRAID, produced by Avtandil Khorava and Mariam Bitsadze (17/07), Dachi is a queer boy from orthodox Georgia, castigated by both church and family. Empowered by an old witch, who knows magic spells, he sets out to change his own reality.
Dachi’s family refuse to accept their son’s sexual orientation and identity. He is physically abused by his parents and neighbours; he is forced to take various psychotropic drugs and go through therapy sessions to change his sexual orientation. This ‘curing process’ is a total failure, so his parents now just ignore his identity, even as he remains in their house.
The only person who takes Dachi seriously is the 84-year-old witch Vardo, who is adept in traditional Georgian magic. By learning her magic techniques, Dachi sets out to escape the daily social oppression and instead create a reality where he can be himself…
The Georgian-language film is in post-production ahead of release in 2024. The budget is €180,000 of which €60,000 has been raised. The team is looking for co-producers, post-production support and further funding.
Producer Khorava told how the feature doc resulted from dissatisfaction while shooting a separate short film. “We discovered that the magic was disappearing. So immediately we knew we had to do something about it…wo we started our journey in search of new characters. We turned around in Georgia and [drove] until the road ended, and we got completely lost in the mountains. I mean we were in the middle of nowhere. But wait, this is when the good stuff begins…”
Moderator Alex Shiriaieff asked who was not afraid to be bewitched by this project. “Never afraid to be bewitched,” responded Natalia Imaz of Parabellum Film, Germany. “Thank you for the pitch. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful images, beautiful protagonist. I’m very excited about this.”
LEAVE EASY COME BACK SAFE is a Belarusian project to be co-directed by interdisciplinary artist Masha Maroz and filmmaker Sasha Kulak. The lyrical project is set in Polesia, a mystical region of Belarus, “where time seems suspended as the seasons pass.” In the film, four characters try to preserve their fading culture. These are beekeeper Misha, the 86-year old healer and pagan Baba Eva, the Belarusian Christian Father Aliaksandar, and Katsiaryna, who maintains old costumes and photographs.
“These four characters act as keepers and passers of an ancient knowledge, at the junction of past and present,” read the project notes. “As if suspended in time, the film journeys through seasons and celebrations that take place from Easter to Fall, honouring the dead and the living. This film is an attempt to document this fading and disappearing culture through people and their connection with their surroundings.”
Co-director Kulak stressed how, since 2020, she has been unable, like thousands of other Belarusians, to return home. “[My] strong homesickness made me realize that I must do whatever I can to protect my culture. The never-ending cycle of repressions and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine have led us to the moment we are in.”
Maroz added: “Belarusian culture and the Belarusian land have never been so under threat. That’s why in the current political climate, my work as an artist can be considered as an act of resistance, and the main goal of our film is to do what the dictatorship fears the most, the revival of a cultural self-identification of our people in Belarus.”
The project is produced by Louis Beaudemont of French outfit Les Steppes Productions. The project is in development, with €5000 of its €145,000 in place. At B2B Doc he was looking for co-production interest, broadcasters and funds.
“Basically this film is a creative documentary,” Beaudemont answered a question from the floor. “So we will work on the storyline, on the crisis of each character and really talk about a remote place where the fantastic can happen. For viewers it’ll be very visual, very emotional and we’ll work a lot on the music and on-stage elements. And we also want to work on its animation…I think the storytelling in the film will be this kind of disbalance between good and evil that is in this area. Evil means propaganda, evil means cultural cleansing, evil means all that Lukashenko’s power, supported by Russia, is trying to do in Belarus right now.”
Kenan Aliyev of Kenan Kino Production (CZ/US) voiced his strong support for the project. “We have to look at Belarus now from the historic perspective, because the country is going in the direction of North Korea and it’s completely under the control of Russia. I don’t know if in one or two years we’ll be able to have any images or films coming from Belarus. So any attempt to even tell the story – and I have no doubt that in your mind [you know] what you want to tell – is very important. So I believe in this project.”
Ukrainian Kornii Hrytsiuk’s MEMO ’94 tells of a recent episode in history which has taken on cataclysmic significance. In 1994, leaders of four countries gathered in Budapest to sign a document supposed to guarantee peace – which is now the cause of the war in Europe, the project notes read. The Budapest Memorandum was designed to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Three memoranda (also including Belarus and Kazakhstan) were originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States.
In 2022 one of the signatories, Russia, “violated every term of the Memorandum, launching a full-scale invasion,” the synopsis continues. “Through eyewitness accounts from military personnel and evidence gathered by journalists, the film explores Russia’s disregard for the Memorandum and its later nuclear threats. The narrative addresses international law, war and peace, non-nuclear-weapon state status, betrayal, justice and global nuclear safety.”
“We’ll also film in former military bases and missile silos that we already discovered in Ukraine to show our audience this huge nuclear weapon infrastructure in Ukraine,” commented Hrytsiuk.
The project team of director Hrytsiuk and producer Anna Palenchuk (435 Films) promises unpublished archival footage and photos of Ukraine’s disarmament in the 90s, along with expert interviews, modern footage, and graphics. Filming is set to take place at former secret military sites in Ukraine, USA, and the UK.
The story will be further illustrated by the personal story of a former Russian soldier who was active during this period in the early 90s and whose family are now separated by the current conflict. As the former soldier lives in western Ukraine, his son is fighting the invaders in Kharkiv while his daughter is living in Germany as a refugee with her children.
“This personal story about the Russian family will give the audience emotional connection, because we wanted to not only [make an] engaging documentary based on our investigations of Ukrainian disarmament, but also a visually appealing and emotionally impactful one,” said Hrytsiuk.
“Memo 94 points not just [to the] past,” said Palenchuk of the €397,849 project (of which €32,849 is raised). “It’s about the current situation and the future.”
Maciej Hameka (Impakt Film, Poland) stressed how, “I think it could transform into one of the most important films that will pinpoint the responsibility of the West in this war and the responsibility to position itself on one of the sides…It’s an overall great project on so many levels.”
In Georgian Mariam Nikolaishvili’s OPERATION CHAMPION audiences will encounter 28-year-old Gvantsa who, after a devastating car accident which claimed the life of her aunt, went on to become European wheel-chair fencing champion. Then, together with Georgian teammates Nina and Irma, she [successfully] set out to conquer the world, and now has the 2024 Paris Paralympics in her sights. To maintain her status as a para-athlete, she refuses surgery, but continued refusal may result in permanent disablement. Is Olympic gold worth that price?
“When I first met my protagonist, Gvantsa, I was in my twenties, already married and pregnant, and I had fears and was constantly questioning myself if I would be able to become both a filmmaker and a mother in a society where people believe that filmmaking is not a female profession, but the most important thing is to raise kids,” commented director Nikolaishvili. “So one day on TV I saw Gvantsa, a girl with her teammate, sitting on a wheelchair and fencing, and that picture glued me to the screen and gave me goosebumps. And I realized that for some people there are no boundaries at all when they really want to achieve their aims, despite their physical disabilities or emotional traumas.”
Gvantsa has endured severe discomfort for four years, the project notes underline, as she disregards her doctor’s instructions. She believes success is more important than well-being, as it improves her living circumstances and promises financial independence.
In the background there are two men, firstly the coach Malkhazi who is both coach and father figure for Glenza, and who encourages her to become a successful champion, and on the other side there is the doctor who has saved Gvantsa life and now wants to help her to make a full recovery.
The project has the full backing of the Georgian Olympic/Paralympic committee, but that will not necessarily guarantee close access to participants as they compete in Paris. Therefore producer Irina Golashvili is looking to secure a French co-production partner on the €500,000 project, as well as funding and broadcasters. Release is expected in 2016.
The third Ukrainian-themed project is VERA MEANS BELIEF by Pavel Braila, produced by Lilia Braila (Art Watt, Moldavia). The synopsis describes a “poignant film telling the story of Vera Derevyanko, a 72-year-old former milkmaid from Odessa who became a refugee at the onset of the war in Ukraine.” The project follows her journey as she refuses to leave the Palanca Refugee Camp, situated at the Moldovan-Ukrainian border, despite offers of better accommodation. She explains that she wants to stay as close as possible to her home and children who are under bombardment. But little by little Vera, also a sensitive poetess, finds herself the sole occupant of the camp…
Braila explained the background to his €150,000 project, for which half the money is raised, with a mooted release in 2025. “After the war broke out, I went immediately with my friends to the Moldovan Ukrainian border to document how thousands of refugees are escaping the bombing and looking for shelter. In the crowd. I was struck by a woman, Vera, 72 years old. What really I impressed me is the way how she was outspoken about what was happening.”
But the director soon realized that she wanted to make the camp a permanent home. “Time was passing and the flow of the refugees slowed down, but Vera was there, and one night she was almost alone in this camp…I understood that [she] could be the character of my next film,” the director says. So Braila followed her for a year and half, and watched her transform her temporary accommodation onto “a very comfortable nest where she’s just dealing with her daily life.”
“But at the same time, I discovered some cracks and some pain. First of all is the relationships between her and her children,” Braila adds. “The picture of her life was completely shaken because Russia in her mind was always a positive thing. And this positive thing that was in her mental landscape took her house and shattered completely her sense of eternal stability. So my film is an intimate portrait of a woman that is not just living in the camp, the border, but also is at the border of change.”
“I want to follow her on her journey to find her home, hopefully in Ukraine, after the war is finished. And also she’ll find her peace,” Braila continues. “But at the same time, I also want to show human strength, resilience and struggle amid life’s toughest challenges, even in old age.”
