Entries are still open for Civil Society Pitch, the workshop organized by One World Romania, until February 13, 2020.

Civil Society Pitch aims to bring in contact filmmakers and activists willing to explore together the economic or political realities of the East-European region. The ultimate goal of the program is to create teams for long-term collaborations.

For the first time in Romania, the integral edition of the Civil Society Pitch international program will be held during a full year. The five phases of the program are:

– Pitching session, matchmaking and acceleration phase – March 2020;

– Research and development – April-October 2020;

– Follow-up workshop – November 2020;

– Development and production – December 2020 – February 2021;

– Public pitching session and development award – March 2021.

The first workshop will be held between March 20-22, at ARCUB, during the 13th edition of the One World Romania festival. Any organization or individual involved in the defense of human rights, as well as filmmakers from Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria and Hungary are invited to apply.

The selection process focuses on the relevance and importance of the proposed topics, as well as the possibility of them being developed into documentary film projects. The participants’ experience in the human rights area and the access to information and people related to the proposed topic that they can later offer to the directors are taken into account.

Maximum 15 NGOs and 20 filmmakers from the partner countries will be selected, so as to have at least five solid teams that will work together throughout the entire program on a documentary film subject. At the final pitching session in March 2021, a 4000 euro prize for development will be awarded to one of the filmmakers, in order to support the production of the project.

The tutors of the March 2020 workshop are Andy Glynne (author, director and producer in the UK), Guillaume Massart (documentary, essay, experimental film and visual art director and producer) and Mona Nicoara (producer and director), and the selection process will be conducted by the organizing team in the partner countries.

The award of the last edition was won by Laurențiu Garofeanu, with his Lost and Found project: the story of a young Roma woman raised in Canada by an adoptive family who, after more than 20 years, comes back to Romania in search of her biological family.

You can apply for the Civil Society Pitch workshop until February 13, 2020. The first workshop will be held at ARCUB, on March 20-22.

More details about the application rules, and the form, can be found here.

Civil Society Pitch partners are Balkan Documentary Center (Bulgaria), the VERZIO International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (Hungary) and the MOLDOX Community Association (Republic of Moldova).

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.