Emerging Producers 2022: Silvia Panáková

The only European programme of its kind focused on documentary film producers – that’s Emerging Producers. The flagship of the industry programme of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival offers an October workshop in Jihlava and then, a second workshop in Berlin in February. Slovak producer Silvia Panáková will be attending.

Even if we ignore her TV beginnings that led her to study production at VŠMU in Bratislava, she has been producing films for nearly two decades. With her company Arina, she collaborated on numerous successful Czech-Slovak co-productions such as the biographical drama Jan Palach (2018, dir. Robert Sedláček), or the sports drama Fair Play (2014, dir. Andrea Sedláčková), and she also has the dance film Backstage (2018, dir. Andrea Sedláčková) under her belt. Producing Piargy (2022, dir. I. Trajkov) was a big, complicated challenge. So far, her last finished film is the documentary Unseen (2021, dir. Maia Martiniak), dealing with the topic of postpartum trauma. It took eight years to get the film to the viewers.

As she said herself, the films Panáková partakes in have to appeal to her, either with their vision, themes, or the author’s charisma. She likes collaborating with female directors – most recently, she has been making a documentary about open relationships and polyamory with Diana Fabiánová. With this project, they participated in the Ex Oriente Film programme specialising on Central and Eastern European documentaries last year. It also brought them the Golden Funnel award for the most progress made. “We won the award as the project that has progressed the most during the course of the programme. The director deserves much of the credit for that, as she was the one who followed the tutors’ recommendations, altered the concept of the film and narrowed it down. Instead of the intended stories of a number of people, she focused on her own story. The tutors appreciated the fact that she decided to put her own skin in the game,” the producer said. This encouragement came at a time when they were considering whether they should even continue with it.

Just as the aforementioned The Boundaries of Fidelity, the fiction project by Stanislav Párnický titled Alone Among Strangers is also being developed. The former Slovak Minister of Culture through many years, Marek Maďarič, wrote the screenplay which is based on the book by Kathryn Winter. The story combines history with the present and the fate of a Jewish girl during the war with her life many years later.

The other Panáková’s project in progress is in the post-production phase. One of them is a portrait of the famous Czech musician Michael Kocáb who joined politics after the Velvet Revolution. Kocáb managed to broker the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Czechoslovakia, which was invaded in 1968. The film is directed by the well-known documentarist Olga Sommerová, who is also a politician. The new fiction Czech-Iranian-Slovak co-production Absence (dir. Ali Mosaffa) also returns to a communist Prague – an Iranian is looking for traces left in the Czech metropolis by his father in his youth.

The tenth edition of Emerging Producers will host 18 producers. Seventeen of them come from European countries and one spot belongs to the hosting country, which is currently South Korea, represented by the producer and director Jin Jeon.

Text: Matúš Kvasnička, Jaroslava Jelchová
Source: Film.sk Berlinale Edition 2022

published:
updated: 27.01.2022