Transylvania Film Festival launches television genre laboratory

This year, the Transylvania Film Festival focuses on genre projects from Central and Eastern Europe. The Full Moon Creative Lab, initiated by the festival in collaboration with Romania Film Promotion, is launched this year with a focus on thriller, horror and fantasy television series projects.

The Lab builds on the festival’s Full Moon script competition, launched in 2020, which awards three creative residencies per year to winning writers from Transylvania. Ileana Cecanu, head of the Full Moon Creative Lab project, said the response to the new TV show, first revealed a year ago, has “exceeded all expectations.” Cecanu said she hopes we’ll soon see the projects featured at this year’s Full Moon on a television or streaming platform in the near future. “I would definitely be the first to attack them,” she said.

The three projects selected for the Full Moon Creative Lab program, which aims to improve creators’ collaborative skills in series writing in a European context, are the Slovenian mini-series thriller Negative division written by Barbara Skubic, the supernatural horror series Undying Care Unit by the Italian screenwriter Giulio Rizzo and the Romanian detective series Dawnwritten by Adina Istrate.

Additionally, nine other talented screenwriters from across Europe were chosen during the open call and assigned to one of the three projects, thus forming three groups of screenwriters. This year-long creative collaboration had its grand finale with a pitch session at the Transylvania International Film Festival in front of influential producers, broadcasters, sales agents, television representatives and major streaming platforms. The winning project will receive the Full Moon Creative Lab Award, a grant of €5,000 ($5,300), co-funded by the European Union, for its further development.

Launched in 2014 as a workshop for young filmmakers from Romania and Moldova, the Transylvania Pitch Stop has since evolved into a premier co-production platform for regional filmmakers from the Balkans and Black Sea. More than 100 projects selected over the years have landed in major international festivals including Berlin, Cannes and Venice.

In its 11th edition, the Transylvania Pitch Stop featured film projects in development from Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and Ukraine presented to producers and financiers, sales agents, to film funds and other industry professionals, followed by individual meetings. a meeting.

“Key themes of the selected projects include relationships, personal struggles, social issues and historical contexts. We also emphasize diversity with female voices and coming-of-age stories,” explains Dumitrana Lupu, who is now in his third year at the helm of Transylvania. Industrial program of the International Film Festival. “This year we had a special treat before the pitch: a short presentation of some of the completed films that have already participated in TPS, offering a glimpse into their…