Selamlik Wins Eurimages Award at Karlovy Vary
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- "Selamlik" (Sweden, Denmark), directed by Jerry Carlsson, won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award with a €20,000 ($22,800) cash prize; the film follows Furat, a Syrian writer exiled in Sweden, who travels to Córdoba to reunite with Pierre, "the love of his life" he left behind while fleeing the war.
- "Reminiscence" (Ukraine), directed and written by Anastasia Tykha and produced by Darya Bassel, received an additional €20,000 cash prize and also won the Connecting Cottbus Award; it follows Sasha returning to her hometown to find her brother's staged photos three years after he vanished in the war.
- The "Selamlik" jury called the story "resonant strongly in today's geopolitical context" with "too many displaced individuals," while the "Reminiscence" jury highlighted the female-led creative team exploring "universal themes of loss, grief and survival" in today's Ukraine.
- "They Bloom at Dawn" (North Macedonia), directed by Angela Dimeska, won the Midpoint and KVIFF Development Award with a €10,000 cash prize; the jury described it as "a project about human and family relationships in the context of an environmental crisis," where a grandmother fights investors over a lakeside luxury resort.
- Producer Monika Matuszewska won the Rotterdam Lab Award for the Polish film "Confirmation," and producers Tomáš Hrubý ("Cowgirl") and Eva Váchová ("A Few Branches Off") received the Marché du Film Producers Network Award for their Czech Central Stage showcase projects.
Why it matters: The jury's framing of "Selamlik" — at its core a romance about reuniting with a lost love — as resonant with "too many displaced individuals" shows how European arthouse funders are reading refugee themes into intimate stories. Of €50,000 in named cash prizes, €40,000 went to projects explicitly rooted in Syria and Ukraine, signaling where coin concentrates in this development cycle.
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