Editor

This week, the FilmFestival Cottbus is travelling more than 600 kilometres to Svetlogorsk on the Baltic coast.

Festival director Roland Rust and festival manager Andreas Stein are going there following an invitation to the 5th Baltic Debuts Film Festival in the Kalingrad region which belongs to Russia. On July 31, 2008, they will present the Cottbus festival of East European cinema and give a taster of the 18th festival edition which is set to have "New Cinema from the Baltics" as its focus from November 11 to 16, 2008. After the presentation, the Cottbus festival will invite festival delegates to attend a panel exploring the prospects for German-Russian film relations and discussing the possibilities for future cooperation with the media region of Berlin-Brandenburg.
„Russia has recently surged back as by far the most important film producer in the whole of the East European region. Cottbus will acknowledge this successful trend by introducing a >Russian Day< within the festival and thereby also stimulate more intensified programming of Russian films in German cinemas," Roland Rust stresses.

As part of this exclusive presentation there will be screenings of two new feature films which were funded substantially by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg: the summery tragicomedy YOU ARE NOT ALONE | DU BIST NICHT ALLEIN by Bernd Boehlich and Robert Thalheim's sensitive romantic drama AND ALONG COME TOURISTS | AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN which is set in today's Oswiecim (the former Auschwitz). The latter film is showing as one of ten feature films in the international competition at the Baltic Debuts Film Festival. The graduate of the Film and Television Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Robert Thalheim, was represented in the programme of the 15th FilmFestival Cottbus in 2005 with his feature debut NET | NETTO.

The presentation of the Cottbus festival will end with an East European Cocktail bringing personalities of the international film industry together with figures from the worlds of politics, diplomacy and business. Apart from representatives of the two partner festivals of Svetlogorsk and Cottbus, the guests will also be welcomed by Kirsten Niehuus, managing director of the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and main supporter of the FilmFestival Cottbus, and by Simone Baumann as a representative of German Films.
„Through our presence at the up-and-coming festival of Svetlogorsk we are sending out a signal in the increasingly important Russian region and, at the same time, drawing attention here to this year's Focus on the >Baltic States<," says festival director Rust when defining the trip's ambitions.