Greenhouse Fund – Notes from the Field

POV Executive Director Simon Kilmurry has just returned from the Greenhouse Fund seminars in Izmir, Turkey.

The third year of the Greenhouse Fund seminars concluded last week in Izmir, Turkey. Greenhouse is a professional initiative devoted to the development of documentaries from across the Mediterranean region. It is funded by the European Union, and features a series of intensive training and mentoring seminars aimed at supporting the next generation of documentary filmmakers.

Ten projects in development from countries bordering the Mediterranean are matched up with mentors, experts and editors to develop their stories, hone their pitching skills and build a network of filmmaking peers. They meet three times through the year with ongoing support from mentors — this year’s experts included Han Robert Eisenhauer (ZDF) and filmmakers Lucinda Broadbent and John Appel — all under the expert guidance of Greenhouse managing director Sigal Yehuda. Read more about the mentors here.

The seminar ended with a pitching forum and one-on-one meetings with reps from broadcasters and festivals around the world — Jane Ray (BBC), Patricia Finnernan (Sundance Doc Fund), Claire Aguilar (ITVS) and Sonja Heinen (Berlinale) — and many more. Pitching forums can be pretty intimidating venues, especially when you are doing it for the first time and in English, which for all of these filmmakers is a second or third tongue. The panel was tough, but not quite as ruthless as other industry panels such as IDFA.

Filmmakers from Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Israel, Palestine and Turkey presented their films — the full list can be seen here. Standout projects for me included:

Voice of My Father, directed by Zeynel Do?an and produced by Melisa ?nel. The film, which won a $15,000 pitching award from ITVS, tells the story of Zeynel’s desire to connect with his late father through the audio letters his father had sent home when he was a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The intensely personal film is full of longing and mystery.

Borderline, by Shirli Nada Michalevicz and produced by Claudia Levine, is a funny and touching portrait of the Kafr Shaul Mental Health Center in Jerusalem, which treats Palestinians and Jews side by side.

T?lay German: The Black Box of the Plane Which Never Crashed, directed and produced by Didem Pek?n, explores the life and legacy of seminal Turkish singer and political activist T?lay German. I had never heard her music until last week, and it’s been hard to stop listening to her deeply melancholic and emotional songs.

Look out for these films and the others at festivals in the next couple of years.