The 20th edition of connecting cottbus (coco) on 8-9 November 2018 will again offer producers and film industry professionals the chance to form new partnerships, network and discuss current production trends. A selection of 13 cocoPitch projects and 6 cocoWiP projects from 15 countries in broader Eastern Europe will be presented to a hand-picked audience of co-producers, sales agents and other potential partners. The projects will benefit from the  intensive cocoLab, receiving invaluable feedback from top-level experts, while competing for a variety of awards. Recent coco alumni projects that have been completed this year include Ognjen Glavonic's THE LOAD  (Serbia/France/Croatia/Iran/Qatar) which premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and will screen in the main competition at the FilmFestival Cottbus 2018 alongside YEAR OF THE MONKEY by Vladimir Blazevski (Macedonia/Serbia/Kosovo/Slovenia) and CRYSTAL SWAN by Darya Zhuk (Belarus/United States/Germany/Russia), as well as BREATHING INTO MARBLE by Giedre Beinoriute (Lithuania/Croatia/Latvia) in Spectrum. This year‘s

cocoPitch line-up ranges from modern chase movie and existentialist drama to crime comedy. The selection comprises fresh and exciting work by seven debut feature film directors as well as new projects by award-winning filmmakers like Nicolae Constantin Tanase or Piotr Domalewski, as well as Anna Jadowska who received the Special Pitch Award FilmFestival Cottbus 2017 to present her new project MIRA. Pre-selected by coco at partnering events were Cristian Pascariu’s OCTOBER, winner of the Transilvania Pitch Stop - coco Award at TIFF 2018, and THE UGLY MANDARINE by Piaoyu Xie, which took the Midpoint - coco Award (Midpoint Feature Launch) at Karlovy Vary 2018.