Initiated by Fade In Script Consulting (www.fadein.eu), the final stages of the forum were held at the Moveast International Film Festival (www.moveast.hu).

Panov received the euro 5,000 prize for a story on a war criminal whose case goes to the trial in The Hague.

Decisions at the first all-European screenplay market were made by a three-member jury that included director-writer Richard Kwietnikowski (Owning Mahony) and Christina Kallas, artistic director of the Balkan Film Fund (www.filmfestival.gr/balkan_fund). Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi, in Pecs in another capacity as a member of the festival’s jury judging the feature film competition, was also present at the pitching.

Italian Paolo Poti was given the jury’s special prize of euro 2,000 while a script by Hungarians Csaba Toth and Peter Gal script called Weekend was chosen as best Eastern European screenplay. The entry already won the Hartley-Merill script competition this year.

As FNE reported earlier, a total of 12 runners were selected for the Pecs event by a panel of readers. The predominantly Eastern European line-up consisted five Hungarians and three Poles as well as Slovak, Macedonian, Italian, Dutch, British, Spanish and German scriptwriters. Each script was allowed a five-minute presentation before a panel of 15 producers.

Among the producers who attended were Russia’s Andrey Deryabin (Russian Ark) and Anna Gudkova (Voroshilov’s Shooter, Luna Papa), France’s Cyriac Auriol (Bab Aziz), Poland’s Piotr Mularuk (Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching), Germany’s Alexander Ris (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes), the U.K.’s. Keith Porter (Severance, Creep), and Hungary’s Laszlo Kantor (Trap, Dallas Pashamende).

The Moveast Festival also witnessed the inauguration of the Hungarian Screenwriters Association. Norbert Kobli was named as chairman.