At the media conference, the project was presented by its initiators, heads of film centres from these three countries: Paolo Vidali (Friuli Venezia Giulia Audiovisual Fund), Jožko Rutar (Slovenian Film Centre) and Hrvoje Hribar (Croatian Audiovisual Centre), next to the Governor of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region Debora Serracchiani, Croatian Assistant Minister of Culture Tamara Perišić, and director of TorinoFilmLab Savina Neirotti.
As Paolo Vidali explained, the establishment of RE-ACT is a natural continuation of the long cooperation between Italian, Slovenian and Croatian audiovisual professionals on many successful projects, such as EURODOC forum and the Triestine When East Meets West, which helped develop the award-winning Italian-Croatian film TIR by Alberto Fasulo. In addition to stimulating collaboration and new feature film co-funding models, RE-ACT will also have specifically oriented educational programmes to be conducted in association with TorinoFilmLab, the leading European platform for the development of scripts and projects.
“This is a unique situation in Europe, to have a trilateral super-national audiovisual project, not only for production, but also for education,” said the head of SFC Jožko Rutar, announcing the official signing of the contract establishing RE-ACT at the Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož on 13 September.
“There is something frequently discussed these last few days at the festival, and that is the fact that in Europe many films were made with very little money, which then all remain hungry in a way, like a poor mother of many children. Therefore, we are here trying to do something off mainstream: instead of castrating production and reducing dynamics – we are changing them. I believe this small territory has the potential for uniting creativity, creating a common audience of movie-goers and achieving results,” said the Head of HAVC, Hrvoje Hribar.
The RE-ACT initiative will be implemented in 2015: the first projects of professional networking and education are taking place in the FrameWork programme held at TorinoFilmLab, starting in July, and the first public calls for co-production co-funding will be announced in October.
Savina Neirotti, the director of TorinoFilmLab, said that “this is a win-win situation. At TFL from the very beginning we have been working on feature film development and co-financing and opening ourselves to new regions. RE-ACT is in that sense an ideal partner; we will follow projects in all development stages and at the same time help shape the environment these films will be brought to life.”
Governor of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region Debora Serracchiani expressed her pleasure and gave her support to RE-ACT, considering this only the first stage of a future long-term collaboration in the region. Croatian Assistant Minister of Culture Tamara Perišić said that “such trans-regional mechanisms strengthen the EU values, such as democracy, pluralism and human rights and very few arts today can respond to such challenges – audiovisual art, i.e. film, definitely can.”
All further news regarding the RE-ACT project will be available on the official website. Photographs from press-conference and logo-kit can be downloaded on this link.
