HÀ NỘI — An incomplete movie by director Lương Đình Dũng will be shown at the 22nd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival between November 16 and December 2 in Tallinn, Estonia.

The movie, titled Drowsy City, will compete in the Works in Progress category. The jury will choose the winning project from other contenders including Golden Voices (Israel), Days of Whale (Colombia), Senafon (Russia, Thailand), On the Edge (Russia), The Hunt (Turkey), Sisters (Norway) and Coming Home (Armenia, Russia).

The winning project will get a prize of 10,000 euros to complete the final production stage and boost publicity for the film.

Dũng’s film features Tảo, who lives in an abandoned house. His life is simple until a group of strange men and one woman move to the area.

The movie is adapted from a novel written by the director under the same name in 2008.

Dũng said the movie had a low budget and aimed to participate in international film festivals before its scheduled June 2019 screening in Việt Nam.

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has a sizeable selection of participating films in its four main categories.

The Baltic Event Co-Production Market, where projects are presented to decision makers during two days of intensive one-on-one meetings, with an extra day of training, includes 16 projects from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine, as well as the 2018 focus country, Italy.

They will be vying for the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, worth 20,000 euros, the Best Pitch from Screen International and two passes to the 2019 Producers Network from the Cannes Film Market.

The Baltic Event Works in Progress showcase feature films in production or post-production looking for a sales agent or a festival for an international premiere. They are split into two categories. The international category has eight projects, and the Baltic category has 11. The main award in the International section is 10,000 euros of post-production services from Finnish company Post Control, while the top prize in the Baltic section is a contribution of 3,000 euros towards expenses for promotion and distribution in the Baltic countries.

The POWR Baltic Stories Exchange trains writers to deliver a good pitch and find a producer at the public project presentation, as well as get industry feedback from carefully selected Baltic Event participants. This year, it is partnering with In Focus, a Finnish initiative aimed at female filmmakers. It includes ten projects, six of them by Finnish female screenwriters.

Finally, Script Pool Tallinn is a script competition that gathers talented scriptwriters whose projects already have producers attached to provide them with support for enhancing their scripts and maximising production and distribution potential. The main award of 5,000 euros is provided by international sales company Global Screen GmbH.  — VNS