The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has always been one of the summer highlights, especially for the FilmFestival Cottbus film scouting team. Once again this year, we organised the traditional networking reception in cooperation with connecting cottbus and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg on the occasion of the industry event ‘Eastern Promises’. At Eastern Promises, there were once again numerous film projects to discover that will be coming to the big screen in the future.
The film festival once again screened a wealth of diverse films - from DUCHON, Peter Bebjak's - a regular guest in Cottbus with his genre films - dynamic bio-pic about the Slovakian pop star Karel Duchon, who died young, to BROKEN VOICES (dir: Ondřej Provaznik) , a film about sexual abuse in a girls' choir inspired by real incidents, to Dužan Duong's - winner of the Cottbus Script Development Award 2017 - autobiographically influenced SUMMER SCHOOL, 2001, which tells the story of an eventful summer in the life of a Vietnamese migrant family in Cheb, Czech Republic, characterised by coming-of-age controversies and coming out. Three examples of the vitality of the Slovakian and Czech film scenes, whose productions have asserted themselves in a strong international programme - and, who knows, may also be coming to Cottbus in November.