BUCHAREST: Leonardo Tonitza has begun shooting a long documentary on the origins of the Romanian language, Niascharian (Let's Revive)/Niascharian (Să renaştem). Preproduction began in March 2011, producer Alexandru Iclozan told FNE. Shooting takes place in several Romania locations and also in Chişinău, in the Republic of Moldavia.

TALLINN: Estonian director Ilmar Raag takes on French cinema classics by casting Jeanne Moreau in the lead role of his upcoming feature Une Estonienne à Paris (Veel üks croissant), currently in postproduction. The film is a co-production between TS Production (France), Amrion (Estonia, www.amrion.ee) and La Parti Production (Belgium) and budgeted at a reported 1.9 million EUR.

WARSAW: The Polish documentary Six Degrees which tests the theory that everyone in the world is connected by only six degrees of separation (six people), has reached Mexico in a journey that began in June 2011 in Poland. The film drew wide interest when it was pitched at Docu Talents from the East at the Karlovy Vary IFF (www.kviff.com ) in July.

BUCHAREST: Romanian director Dinu Tănase wraps filming 19 October 2011 on Portraits in a Forest, a contemporary police story involving a crime and an officer solving the case. Shooting started in September, takeing place in Bucharest and other Romanian towns.

An adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel, The Idiot (Idioot) by Estonian director Rainer Sarnet screened in the Flash Forward section of the Busan International Film Festival. The film, produced by Katrin Kissa of the Homeless Bob Productions and budgeted at a reported 565,000 EUR, opened domestically on 14 October 2011 to generally positive critical acclaim.

WARSAW: Polish director Katarzyna Rosłaniec explores the topic of teen pregnancy in her new drama Baby Blues presented at the CentEast forum in Warsaw.

WARSAW: Polish director Andrzej Jakimowski (Tricks) is in post production with Blind Watching, a moving drama with documentary-style improvised moments about the importance of making a connection despite the loss of vision.

Rules of Single Life, a character-driven documentary, was directed by Bulgaria born expat Tonislav Hristov, residing in Finland since 1999.

The experimental three partsfilm Mothers by Milcho Manchevski is the Macedonian director's second coproduction with Bulgaria, following Shadows which was coproduced the Bulgarian company Camera (www.camera.bg). Mothers was coproduced by Bulgaria's Elements with funding support from the Bulgarian National Film Center (www.nfc.bg),

The low-budget 61-minute HD feature film Fish Cry Freedomis a feature debut from an Austrian film director and cultural anthropologist living in Munich, Wilma Kiener. Gergana Kofardzhieva and Itzko Finci star as two aging theatre actors preparing for a film in a desolate Sofia family kitchen.

BUCHAREST: Radu Gabrea is in the last stages of postproduction with his docu-drama The Last Days of Ceauşescu, with plans for a pre-premiere screening on Christmas, the day the Romanian dictator died 22 years ago.

Ave is a first feature film from Konstantin Bojanov, funded with €300,000 in public support from the National Film Center (www.nfc.bg), €14,000 - from the Bulgarian National Television (www.bnt.bg), €100,000 from KB Films and €50,000 from Camera.

POZNAN: Łukasz Barczyk has been selected by the Marshal Office of the Great Poland region to direct a film about the Great Polish Uprising, the most successful of Polish insurrections. The major historical drama will be completed before December 2013.

BUCHAREST: Spanish director Chema Rodriguez is in preproduction with Night Falls in India, a feature based on a script he wrote together with the Romanian filmmaker Cătălin Mitulescu.

WARSAW: Indie Polish filmmakers Paweł Sarbinowski and Piotr Zukowski have begun principal shooting on Heaven, a comedy about celebrity afterlife which will premiere in 2012.

BRATISLAVA: Slovak director Róbert Šveda (Demons) is in post-production with his second full-length feature, Angels, due for completion and release in autumn 2011.