Bekas Wins 2010 Nordic Talents Award

Bekas is the feature length version of Kader's 29 minute graduation film from Stockholm's Dramatiska Institutet, a ‘Cinema Paradiso meet Slumdog Millionaire' that provoked tears and laughter from Nordic Talents attendees. The five member jury comprising Danish director Per Fly, Kaisu Isto, Film Commissioner at the Finnish Film Foundation, Peter Gustafsson, Commissioning Editor Drama and Culture at SVT, Norwegian producer Turid Øversveen (Junkmail), and UK Producer Andy Harries (The Queen) issued the following statement: "Karzan Kader is a very talented director who shows enormous clarity of vision about what he wants to achieve with his film. His project is simple, powerful, humorous and affecting. His graduation film is a remarkably confident and mature piece of work with great performances in a terrific setting, drawing as it does from the well of his own extraordinary personal experiences."

The second award, the Special Mention Award and its NOK50,000 development support was handed out to You Could Have Been Me pitched by Norwegian director/scriptwriter Mariken Halle and Swedish cinematographer Clara Boden, two graduates from Göteborg University Film School, known for its auteur-driven curriculum. "The project reflected an original and ambitious new approach to making films, built on the brave and challenging ideas in their graduation film Maybe Tomorrow. We believe they have the will power and talent to explore fresh new areas with their actors which will excite them and we hope cinema audiences in the future, "said the jury.

Two other projects - among 12 pitches - were shortlisted: the animation series Sonny and Ronny by Rickard S. Söderström from the National Film School of Denmark, and the genre film The Unliving by Hugo Lija from Dramatiska Institutet.

Per Fly who attended Nordic Talents for the first time felt the event was ‘very inspiring'. "There were a lot of experimental projects, but that's normal when you're young", he noted. This year's Swedish winner Karzan Kader said the award will allow him to take his time to develop his script - currently in the first draft - and to find the right producer.

Over the last nine years, 20 Nordic Talents awards have been granted to film projects of which three are in development and eleven are finished or in production. The 2008 second prize winner Run Sister Run by Finland's Marja Pyykkö is a box office success (almost 110,000 admissions in four weeks to date) and two previous winners just received production support from Nordisk Film & TV Fond: Carlo's Casino, a 3D stereoscopic animation film by Denmark's Jan Rahbek, and Volcano by Iceland's Runar Runarsson.