Roland Rust, the Director of the Film Festival in Cottbus (www.ilmfestival.pool-production.de) spoke with FNE about the details of the cooperation with ERA New Horizons festival.

The cooperation launched at ERA New Horizons (www.enh.pl) in Wrocław, where Rust personally presented three of the Cottbus 2008 award-winners: the Czech drama The Village Teacher, Tulpan and Delta. It marks the beginning of a project created by Rust and ERA fest director Roman Gutek to promote the East European Cinema with a special focus on Poland in Cottubus.

"Thanks to the encouragement of the Polish Institute in Berlin we managed to start a cooperation with the festival in Wrocław. To underline how serious we are with our plans, we took part in the presentation of our wining movies during this year's ERA NH and we asked Roman Gutek to be a member of our official international jury and choose a selection of the movies from his festival to be presented during the next edition of the Cottbus festival in November 2009." Rust told FNE.

Rust added that Cottbus will host a selection of events devoted to promoting Polish cinema. "We will try to establish a special Polish platform, besides our regular festival section, where Poland has always a prominent presence. It will be similar to the event that we've established successfully a year ago with the Russian cinema, the Russian Day which will be repeated in Cottbus annually. These two countries will have a special place in our program. For Poland we would like to focus on the productions and genres that are maybe underrepresented internationally. We would like to start with a retrospective of Polish animation inspired by the screenings of the films by Piotr Dumała in Wrocław," he said. "We are inspired by the events taking place in Wrocław and we would like to be open for several options to promote Polish cinema, in a way 'polonaising' a part of our festival, which could maybe attract also Polish audience in the future."