Interview with producer Marek Urban, Slovak Producer on the Move 2015

After studying documentary filmmaking, what lead you to establishing a production company sentimentalfilm and why the title?

I think the name speaks for itself, if you need a clue, have a look at the movies we produced and you will find out. Anyway, we have established the company during our studies with Ivan Ostrochovský. At that time, Ivan was running a one-man company with a very similar name, I already had quite a lot experience with film production from working in the film industry for almost fifteen years in different positions, so we merged, and set up sentimentalfilm. In the beginning, our intention was to develop and produce our own projects, later on, we got some offers for co-productions, so the company started to grow. Now, besides our own projects we produce projects of others, mostly young and promising authors.

 Your latest production Koza is a directorial feature debut, involving non-professional actors. Was it a different experience from the work on your previous projects?

Well, we both knew Koza (Peter Baláž) for a longer time, Ivan knew him from his childhood. The story itself is inspired by some moments from Koza’s life. From the beginning it was clear to us, that Koza will play himself, because he is quite unique, as you might see in the movie. To find the right actor for Koza’s manager was quite a challenge, we rehearsed with several actors, but the interaction between Koza and them was not really working. Finally, we got a suggestion from Marek Leščák, the co-scriptwriter to introduce Zvonko for rehearsals, and it was a perfect match. Concerning the production, we knew that we want to go for authentic and visually interesting locations, our budget was limited and we had to adapt to this situation. We also wanted the shooting to be as stress-free as possible, thus we cut the crew to really minimal size possible which gave us the freedom we needed.

 Most of the productions in your filmography or the upcoming projects are debuts or films of young filmmakers. Do you find young names more challenging?

 At the moment, the people we work with are almost the same age as us. Most of them are preparing their debuts right now, so it’s more or less natural. I hope that we will grow professionally together and also work on their next projects. On the other hand, when we find a project from some younger talent, it is very inspiring to take a look at the topic from a bit different perspective, and add some experience we have. This combination seems to work as well.

 The project you're participating with at the Cannes L'Atelier, OUT, is already an international, Slovak-Hungarian-Czech-French-Latvian film. How did you get involved with all the co-production countries?

György was born in the Southern part of Eastern Slovakia, it is quite common that families there are of various Slovak and Hungarian origins. He lived half of his life in Slovakia, second half in Hungary, while studying filmmaking at Prague´s FAMU. Later on, he married a Latvian woman. So the initial structure of the co-production was rather natural. We are going to shot in countries, that we have a quite a strong relevance to. The Latvian and Hungarian co-producers, were György’s ideas, because he already knew them, so we met and settled the conditions. We added our almost permanent Czech co-production partner and ended up with four co-producers onboard since the very beginning. During the phase of project development we attended several workshops and pitching forums (MIDPOINT, Pitch & Feedback at KVIFF, B’EST EAVE, NCN ROMA, Sofia Meetings) in order to develop the script to its final stage and to find the crucial partners to fill our financial plan, thanks to that we have a French partner attached as well.