The past few days, Imagine welcomed a group of enthusiastic genre filmmakers taking part in our programme for professionals: Imagine Industry. Over the course of three days, they participated in workshops, masterclasses and one-on-one sessions focused on their own projects and guided by script coaches, directors and financiers.
Imagine Industry consists of three programmes: Imagine Project Platform, Imagine Fantastic Talents and European Genre Forum. All three programmes had their own schedules, but everyone came together during the Industry Mixer at the end (and perhaps to sing at our Halloween Drag Karaoke straight after).
Imagine Project Platform
The Imagine Project Platform is a tailor-made programme for genre projects in the development phase. At the festival, the four selected projects (from animation to psychological horror and from dark comedy to sci-fi) pitched their projects to an international jury consisting of Sietz van der Aa (Gusto Entertainment), Ramona Sehr (The Playmaker) and Annick Mahnert (Fantastic Fest, Sitges). They picked a winner for the Imagine Pitch Award: horror project Real Blood, from Joeri Pruys (director, writer, producer) and Ewoud Bon / Rainproof Media (producer). Real Blood is about an activist artist whose distinction between her art and real life start to blur. You can read the jury statement below. After Imagine, the creators will be taking part in the Frontières co-production market in Montréal, Canada. Congratulations!
‘We selected Real Blood as the Imagine Pitch Award recipient for its broad international co-production appeal, its unique setting – which has rarely been exploited in genre cinema yet – and the filmmakers’ awareness of their position in relation to a sensitive topic.’
Imagine Fantastic Talents
Six filmmakers were selected for Imagine Fantastic Talents, a programme geared towards coaching new genre talent working on their first or second short Dutch genrefilm or webseries. The past couple of days, participants took part in script coaching sessions with Chris Mitchell and Sarieke Hoeksma; lessons from filmmakers Nina Raaijmakers, David-Jan Bronsgeest and Tim Koomen (who all took part in Imagine Industry themselves!); a masterclass by script editor Kate Leys; festival strategy advice from Imagine-directeur Chris Oosterom; and presentations from funds and film institutes like AFK, Filmfonds, 3LAB, NPOFonds and De Ontmoeting.
It was nice to see how invested the selected filmmakers were in not just their own, but also the other filmmakers’ projects. Everyone read all the other plans and gave each other great feedback.
European Genre Forum
The European Genre Forum participants also came to Amsterdam this weeks. The teams behind the eight international projects took part in a Producing Lab at Imagine – a two-day programme of talks, workshops, an AI panel and a visit to an Amsterdam film studio. A crash course in the business and production side to filmmaking.
The European Genre Forum (EGF) is a collaboration between Imagine Film Festival, Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn and Fantastic Zagreb. In July, the selected projects already took part in a Screenwriting and Directing Lab at Fantastic Zagreb. In November they will be partaking in the third, and final part of EGF: a Marketing and Packaging Lab during Black Nights.
