After two, intensive days of one-on-one meetings and making business deals, the best projects and producers were honored at an awards ceremony on December 1, 2009 in Tallinn.

Selecting the twelve projects to participate in the anniversary edition of the co-production market was hard enough as the number of submissions went up 10% this year. But on November 30 and December 1, the twelve selected projects representing the Baltics, Scandinavia, Central-Eastern Europe, and Russia met with sales agents, distributors, and producers at the largest co-production market in the region.

Romania’s feature debut director Gabriel Achim and his producer Tudor Giurgiu were overwhelmingly voted the Best of BE, receiving the Baltic Event Best Project award for his black comedy ADALBERT’S DREAM (Libra Films). The award was presented by Baltic Event and included a cash prize of 3000 euros for the production company. For the second time, Screen International gave out a prize for Best Pitch. Martin Blaney handed over this year’s prize to Finnish producers Kaarle Aho and Kai Nordberg from Making Movies OY who were at the market with Petri Kotwica’s next feature RAT KING. After the success of his last project, Kotwica will now have feature coverage in Screen International, with the publication keeping an eye on the progress of the project. Last year’s winners of the prize have commented on the positive results of such extended coverage, mentioning even producers from South America taking an interest in their project after reading about it in Screen International.

Producers from two projects were also highlighted at the ceremony. Cannes Marché du film Producer’s Network gives out two free accreditations to promising young producers. This year, the winners were Estonian Aet Laigu, who presented Kadri Kõusaar’s project EUROPEAN PSYCHO (Meteoriit) and Ella Vakkasova and Gavin Humphreys presenting the Uzbekistan project ARAL (Quark Films/Gorky Film Studio, Uzbekistan/Russia). The project participated as part of the Uzbekistan focus at this edition of Baltic Event, which included information about their film industry and a selection of one project for the market.

Baltic Event has been taking place for eight years already, presenting the latest from the local film industry to international professionals. This year’s Coming Soon presentations of post-production films also included film projects from Finland and screenings of completed films continue throughout December 2nd. Guests were also treated to pitchings by scriptwriters who participated in the two day POWR Storymarket pitching training and then presented their script ideas to the public. The scriptwriters' workshop took place for the second year in cooperation with Script and Pitch Workshops from Italy, Writers Write Films from Denmark and Estonian, Danish, Latvian and Lithuanian Media Desks

Baltic Event has partnerships with the EAVE training program for European producers and the Cinelink market. Other supporters and partners are the Estonian Film Foundation, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, the Cultural Endowment, MEDIA programme, the National Film Center of Latvia, the Finnish Film Foundation, Tallinn Black Night Film Festival, Cannes Marche du Film's Producer's Network, Screen International and Film New Europe.

More information: be.poff.ee/index.html