As has already been announced, MIDPOINT will have a strong presence at the upcoming tenth edition of When East Meets West (WEMW), which is set to unspool during the 31^st Trieste Film Festival. Feature Launch 2020 will have its first workshop (see the news), while MIDPOINT Cold Open is also being organised, inviting along ten producers (see the news). Another programme that will be held and presented during WEMW is MIDPOINT Shorts, which is dedicated to the script and project development of fictional short films currently in development. MIDPOINT Shorts is led by Czech director and script consultant Pavel Marek, along with Lithuanian producer and tutor Marija Razgute.

The programme started last September with its first workshop in Prague, where the teams of the four selected projects focused on different topics, from script analysis, film language and the storyboards of the short films to the packaging and marketing, and the markets that could be useful for them. Also, they were guided by experts through individual and group meetings on how to further develop their projects.

The second and final workshop will focus more intensely on the key topics that were presented before, and apart from the individual consultation meetings and the group sessions, a series of specialised lectures with guest tutors will be held. Some of the topics are the challenges involved when a writer wants to become a director, explained by script consultant and artistic director of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab Gyula Gazdag, the techniques of the visual construction of a film by Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska, and the important dos and don’ts for sales agents by Marcin Luczaj from New Europe Film Sales.

The programme will wrap with a showcase and a pitching session of all of the projects, in front of WEMW’s industry guests, which will be held on 20 January. This will be followed by a networking platform.

The MIDPOINT Shorts projects are as follows:

Jungle Law - Madli Lääne (Estonia)
Producer: Anneli Ahven

Soul Food - Nikos Tseberopoulos (Greece)
Producer: Eleni Kossyfidou

Team Building - Mateusz Pacewicz (Poland)
Producer: Ludka Kierczak

Tell No One - Svetislav Dragomirović (Serbia)
Producer: Nevena Savić