The 18th FilmFestival Cottbus - Festival of East European Cinema (11.-16.11.2008) will be presenting itself on the occasion of the 43rd edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (04.07.-12.07.2008) with a reception and a festival film in the Bohemian spa town. Together with Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, one of the main supporters, as well as the East-West Co-production Market Connecting Cottbus, the festival will be inviting representatives of the film industry, press, supporters and friends on Sunday, 6th July 2008, to an East European Brunch at the "Rendez-vous" of the Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary. Along with the Medienboard managing director Kirsten Niehuus and Gabriele Brunnenmeyer, Artistic Director of Connecting Cottbus, festival director Roland Rust will welcome the guests and give a preview of the festival's 18th edition.
The two competitions for Feature Film and Short Feature will once again present the best talents from throughout the Central and East European region.
This year's Focus will look at the „New Cinema from the Baltics" and be curated by Kornel Miglus, the Film Officer of the Polish Film Institute in Berlin. The cinematographies of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will be presented in a broad context by including the neighbouring countries bordering the Baltic Sea. The programme is supported by the Federal Office for Political Education.
Apart from the established survey of contemporary filmmaking from our Eastern neighbours, the Retrospective emphasises the film historical aspects. Under the title of „1968 - the Prague Spring and the Aftermath" , this film sidebar will be dedicated to a caesura in contemporary history that still has an effect to this day. Funded by the DEFA Foundation, the retrospective will be curated by the Berlin-based film journalist Bernd Buder.

The Promotion Prize of the GWFF of the FilmFestival Cottbus - with a purse of Euros 4,500 - will be awarded for the second time during the reception in Karlovy Vary. The managing director of the GWFF Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrechten mbH München, Gerti Müller-Ernstberger, will present this grant to Marianne Ostrat, a student of the Baltic Film and Media School Tallinn. The prize enables this talent from the focus region of the Baltic States to finance a study visit to a film school outside of her homeland of Estonia.

Apart from sponsoring the Promotion Prize, the GWFF has already been committed since 2000 as the donor of the main prize in the feature film competition for Cottbus. At the 18th edition, the GWFF expanded this continuous support with an attractive increase in the prize-money. The endowment of the Main Prize for the Feature Film Competition has risen from the previous Euros 15,000 to Euros 18,000. The prize is awarded in equal parts to the director and the producer of the best feature film.

Thanks to the increase in the main prize, the overall value of the prizes at the FilmFestival Cottbus has grown to the record sum of Euros 67,000.

In addition to the traditional reception, the FilmFestival Cottbus is also represented with a film presentation at the 43rd International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary. Cottbus will be showing the socio-critical thriller KREMEN | THE HARD-HEARTED in the A-festival's competitive section „East of the West". The feature film debut of the Russian director Alexey Mizgirev was shown in the „Spektrum" of the Cottbus festival in 2007. The screenings in Karlovy Vary take place on 8th and 9th July.

The East West Co-production Market Connecting Cottbus will also be dedicated in its tenth year of existence to the possibilities for development and co-production of European feature film productions. Industry representatives from over 20 Central and East European countries are expected in Cottbus for the annual project pitching. Producers can still apply until 25th July, 2008 for participation in the pitching sessions as part of Connecting Cottbus, accreditations without a project are possible until 03.10.2008. Guidelines and applications forms can be downloaded from www.connecting-cottbus.de .

Two films pitched in Cottbus can be seen in the programme of the Karlovy Vary festival: SVETAT E GOLJAM I SPASENIE DEBNE OTVSJAKADE | THE WORLD IS BIG AND SALVATION LURKS AROUND THE CORNER (dir: Stefan Komandarev, Bulgaria/Germany/Hungary/Slovenia 2008) is showing in „Another View" and MUZIKA | MUSIC (dir: Juraj Nvota, Slovak Republic/Germany 2007) in the competitive section: „East of the West".

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