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PRODUCTION / FUNDING Slovakia

Ivana Hucíková homes in on the Velvet Generation of young queer and trans people

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- The emerging Slovak documentarian plans to capture the everyday lives of the Eastern European LGBTQ+ community in her debut feature-length doc

Ivana Hucíková homes in on the Velvet Generation of young queer and trans people
Velvet Generation by Ivana Hucíková (© nutprodukcia)

“My generation is in limbo, stuck somewhere in between: we feel like we are different from our parents, but we have also somehow inherited their collective trauma,” says Slovak documentarian Ivana Hucíková, who is now preparing her feature-length debut, Velvet Generation. The film will be “a story about the everyday lives of contemporary, young queer and trans people from Eastern Europe, yet it is not a movie about their queerness,” Monika Lošťáková, of Slovakia’s nutprodukcia, told Cineuropa. According to Lošťáková, the film will provide an insight into the lives, accomplishments and everyday struggles of the LGBTQ+ community in Eastern Europe, brought together in the ballroom.

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Hucíková, who previously shot the documentary shorts Mothers & Daughters (2015), Connie&Corey (2017) and Into My Life (2018), plans to combine a traditional cinéma-vérité approach with stylised dream scenes. “Using this method gives us an opportunity to bring out the inner worlds of our protagonists, where they can confront their worries and issues, but also their hopes and dreams, in a creative and cinematic way,” she explains. “Since this is the first feature-length project for both of us, we’ve been facing a lot of challenges from the very beginning – mostly due to the fact that we have chosen to combine different film formats and approaches in one movie, and the fact that we are bringing up a topic that is still considered controversial around here,” adds Hucíková.

Velvet Generation is currently in the early stage of development. “At this moment in time, we have secured financing from Creative Europe – MEDIA. Owing to the COVID-19 situation, we had to change our original plans for the second half of 2020. Our intention is to close the development phase in 2021 and prepare the film for production. The project was pitched for the first time at FIPADOC in January 2021,” Lošťáková revealed to Cineuropa.

She adds, “We are also looking for other options for co-financing the project, as it seems that the topic of the film is a little bit too controversial for the Slovak environment.” Production is set to unfold in 2022 and 2023, while the producers are eyeing the first half of 2024 for the world premiere. They are looking for co-producers, and plan to confirm the co-production countries and secure the financing for production during 2022.

Velvet Generation is being produced by Slovakia’s nutprodukcia and co-produced by fellow Slovak outfit Super Film. The movie does not yet have a sales agent attached.

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