PITCH_IT 5TH EDITION is a workshop programme for emerging directors, writers, and producers who are based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Romania, the Republic of Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Turkey and aims to support their first steps in the film industry. The project is a collaboration between Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and Goethe-Institut funded by the programme „Perspektive Donau” of the Foundation Baden-Württemberg Stiftung.
The art of pitching is the professional oral presentation of a project idea or story. A task that even brilliant filmmakers and producers often fail at. A successful pitch of a film project can decide whether a project is realized or not.
PITCH_IT offers intensive workshops in the fields of production, directing, distribution and film-marketing. All Mentors are highly experienced and decorated members of the current film industry and will guide your project throughout this program. Furthermore, the pitching training by communication trainer Sibylle Kurz is intended to help the participants to prepare their projects in line with the actual film market requirements and offer skills for networking in the international film industry.
At the end of the trainings, the participants can present their film projects to employees of international film festivals (previous Editions featured experts from Sundance, IDFA, Dok.Fest München etc.), film funding agencies, streamers like NETFLIX and distributers like BETA Film and Deckert Distribution alongside Berlinale 2026.
We look forward to applications from filmmakers in the fields of documentary, feature film and experimental film with their long (minimum 60 minutes) film-projects.
Who can participate?
This workshop is designed to give an international platform for emerging directors, writers, and producers who are based in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Romania, the Republic of Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Turkey.
Each country will be represented within the project.
The language of the training and the workshop is English.
The conditions of participation and details can be found in the call for entries.
Here you can find the participating projects of Pitch it 3rd Edition in 2024.
Learn more about the ideas of young filmmakers!
Kristóf Áron Noll-Batek
Kristóf Áron Noll-Batek
I’m a Hungarian screenwriter, studied in Budapest and Bucharest. I’ve always been passionate about filmmaking, tried almost all aspects and departments of the industry. Right now, I’m working on Ballad of a Coal Miner, an Eastern-European time-traveling story. On Pitch-It, We would like to promote our story, and learn how to find contributors to our love project.
Gábor Varga
Gábor Varga
Gábor was born in Rimavská Sobota (Slovakia) in 1994. He studied documentary film directing at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. After that he continued film directing studies at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, which was completed at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna in cooperation with Freeszfe Society. The Pitch It programme gives him the chance to prepare his first feature film about the time travel coal miner called: Ballad of a coal miner.
Explorers of the past have always ventured into the unknown in search of knowledge, new paths and a better understanding of the great questions of their time. Today, in our rapidly changing environment and living conditions, we too must adapt and find new approaches to secure our future. The documentary series Frozen Ocean follows the journey of a contemporary Arctic expedition on a sailig ship, retracing a historic voyage in search of solutions for current and next generations.
I studied film production at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, and aIthough I have been working in film production for several years now, Frozen Ocean is my first project as a director. By making this documentary series, I aim to create a collaborative, creative and scientific awareness-raising endeavor that reaches across borders. I believe that participating at PITCH_IT is a great opportunity to further develop our project and to reach out to international co-production partners and financiers.
Julianna Ugrin
Julianna Ugrin
I am an Eurodoc, EAVE graduate EFA nominated producer with 15 years of experience. Films that I produced, like A Woman Captured or Easy Lessons, were screened and awarded at festivals like Sundance, HotDocs, Locarno, or IDFA, to name but a few. Frozen Ocean is the first documentary seriest that I am developing which brought me to PITCH_IT. We believe that being part of this great initiative will help us to find our partners and collaborators for this ambitious project.
Richárd Viesz, cinematographer
| Richárd Viesz
My name is Daryl Chris and I am a Nigerian citizen. I currently reside in Germany and study at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH. I am honoured to have been selected for PITCH IT 2023 and I think the opportunity to showcase my work and meet leading figures in my field will provide an excellent platform to establish myself and gain insight into the workings of the industry. I am participating in the workshop with my film IF THE HEAVENS, which is about the aftermath of war seen through the eyes of poetry and superstitious spirituality.
Chris Daryl
In Good Faith is a debut film of the director Anna Wowra and producer Tomáš Pertold. Our project is currently in early development and we are excited to get valuable feedback on the film from international industry professionals. Participating in the "Pitch It" workshop not only grants us the opportunity to showcase In Good Faith to potential international co-producers and collaborators but also enables us to refine our social and pitching skills. We are enthusiastic about the prospect of learning and growing alongside fellow filmmakers, forging new friendships, and expanding our professional network.
Determined to break taboos, Eszter Kajlik participates in PITCH_IT with an animated documentary about traumatic childbirth experiences and obstetric violence titled 'Let Me Give Birth in Peace'. Her film explores a wide range of topics, ranging from interventions performed on women without their consent to mothers having difficulties bonding with their infant after having a traumatic childbirth. 'Let Me Give Birth in Peace' ends in a hopeful tone, showing how some subjects of the film gained positive experiences when giving birth to their second child. Eszter is attending PITCH_IT to learn effective ways to communicate about her project and to gain insights into the production and distribution processes. She also hopes that presenting her project at Berlinale will help her find a producer and eventually funding, as she has nearly finished editing the interview materials together and she wishes to work with a crew on the animated parts (whom she desperately wants to pay fairly).
Eszter Kajlik
As a creative director-producer duo studying our final year of Film and TV school in Prague (FAMU) and working in our own production company nukleon frame, we are attending the PITCH_IT workshop with our feature debut film in early development Now and After.
This project is a feature debut drama about a fictional mass shooting in a small Moravian town in the Czech Republic. Through parallel montage and from 3 different perspectives, the film tells subjectively stories of the people involved in the tragedy. Their intersecting fates are shown only on the day of the shooting and on the day exactly 5 years later. The movie deals with themes of failure and heroism and it focuses not only on the trauma but also on the first steps of the healing process.
Attending a workshop such as PITCH_IT is vital for us as we can network with fellow filmmakers, experienced industry professionals and producers from different countries, as well as improve our presentation skills that will make us one step closer to produce our film and reach audiences.
Adele Konecna
Vojtech Konecny
Sophia Tamaro is a German/Italian writer and director, who grew up in Hong Kong and is now based in Berlin. Her scripts have been selected for ScreenCraft's Short Film Screenplay Competition, the Screenwriting competition at the New Orleans Film Festival and as a Second Rounder at the Austin Film Festival. Black comedy "The First Orgasm" will be her directorial debut. Her motivation for submitting for Pitch_It was simple: Sophia wanted to be confronted with different European perspectives on this provocative project and she wanted to improve her understanding of the business language needed to successfully sell not only her ideas but also herself as their creator.
Sophia Tamaro
We are an emerging film director and producer duo from Serbia who are searching for new ways of presenting our projects. ''Thorn'' is a debut film inspired by Frank Wedekind’s play from 1981 “Spring awakening”, about the concept of hysteria in the modern world. Hysteria is no longer perceived as a disease, rather an alarming state of panic that people feel everyday. What interests us in this discourse of repression is the negative space of freedom and how does a generation younger than our own navigate in a world that seems so bewildering and is becoming more and more puritan, at least in our surroundings.
