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EWA’s Mentees for 2019

Discover the mentees of EWA's 2019 mentoring programme for emerging women producers

We are pleased to announce the selection of the mentees for EWA's Mentoring Scheme for emerging women producers who will meet their mentors in Trieste on 20 January 2019. EWA’s Producer’s Mentoring Scheme will allow mentees to upgrade the core skills and competences needed in their profession such as financing, negotiating, management and business development. Mentors do not deliver solutions to mentees, the purpose of mentoring is to bring the mentee’s professional growth to an upper level.

The program will run for 12 months and starts with a one day introductory meeting of mentees and mentors in Trieste during WEMW 2019, followed by a second meeting organized in Thessaloniki in November. Additionally to the monthly online mentoring sessions, the mentoring group will be able to catch up in person at the different festivals where EWA will be present and organise informal meetings, such as Berlinale and Cannes.

Emanuela Barbano (Italy)

Emanuela Barbano, Graduated in Economics and Business. In 2000 she started a twelve years career in the branded content industry, coordinating projects, video production, budget and marketing campaign.
In 2012, her career took a different turn, approaching the independent movie production. Since then she has been working for Duel: Film where she is currently partner and producer. In 2013 She attended Maia Workshops - training programme for European producers. She is a Torino Film Lab Audience Designer Alumni and she is a consultant of the TFL Audience Design fund. In 2018 she completed her first feature creative documentary and she is currently developing two feature documentaries and a fiction feature film.

Maria Ibrahimova (Azerbaijan) 

Award-winning filmmaker Maria Ibrahimova made her debut film, the documentary MISS GULAG, with the support of the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation. The film premiered at the Berlin Int. Film Festival and traveled to more than 40 festivals around the world. It was later shown on the BBC, many channels in Europe and the United States, and is available on iTunes. Awarded a Fulbright to pursue her documentary work on land-mines in Azerbaijan, she started her production company Cinex, going on to make an array of music videos, commercials, and documentaries.

Nancy Kokolaki (Greece)

Nancy is a film producer and founded member of the cultural organization Bad Crowd. Her most recent credits include the filmSIDEWAY by Tayfun Pirselimoglu (premiere Warsaw FF’18, best director, best male actor in Istanbul FF’18, best art director in Ankara FF’18). Along with Nikos Moustakas, they have established Bad Crowd, envisioning an international network of artists, aiming to create artworks and social artistic actions in all over the world. Their first intercultural, social and artistic initiative CHILDREN WITHOUT NIGHTMARES, about refugee’s children, is in progress and they are in the production of the mini TV series SIX NIGHTS ON THE ACROPOLIS based on the novel of the nobelist George Seferis and approved by the national broadcaster ERT.

Aleksandra Kostina (Ukraine)

Aleksandra was born in Kiev, Ukraine. She graduated from The Kyiv National Economic University, as an economist. Since 2007 works in the film industry. During 2007-2010 as a line producer, producing TV films, documentaries, and TV shows. Since 2010, she works as a freelance line producer on the numberless feature films, mostly international co-productions. In 2018 Aleksandra has attended Maia Workshops - training programme for emerging European producers. One of the upcoming projects for Aleksandra as a co-producer is the GLOWMAN, director Bence Fliegauf, it is co-production between M&M Film (Hungary), Manderley Films (Germany) and Limelite (Ukraine). Her current project as a producer is a feature film PAMFIR, director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk.

Laurine Pelassy (France)

Laurine Pelassy founded her own company in 2012 Les Films de la Capitaine to produce movies offering an attractive and inquisitive vision of life. She establishes strong relationships with talented young director in order to lead them make the step from short to feature films. At the beginning, she produced Thomas Bardinet’s feature An imaginary adolescence of Nino Ferrer, Grégoire Graesslin’s short film Helix Aspersa (International Competition « Pardi di Domani», Locarno Film Festival, 2014) as well as the creative documentary of Léo Ponge, In Search of Bigfoot which travelled all over the world and was screened by Planète+ TV. In 2017, she produced Idir Serghine’s medium length film Cross (Special Mention of the Distribution Jury at the Brive Film Festival, 2018) and Léo Ponge’s short film Memoria. In 2018, she produced the short films Breathless by Stéphanie Doncker and The immortals of Caroline Deruas, both in late post-production.

Silvana Santamaria (Germany)

Silvana Santamaria is a German-Italian film director, screenwriter and producer residing in Berlin. Since 2007, she works regularly with TV channels like ARTE, ZDF, BR and SWR, and has been repeatedly grant-aided by the Media and Film Company Baden-Württemberg (MFG). With her films she won important national and international awards. (Max Ophüls Prize, Young European CIVIS Media Prize, and many others) Her her films were screened in A-Festivals like San Sebastian Film festival and Shanghai Film festival. Since 2013 she is one of the co-founders, of the film production company SOILFILMS where she successfully writes, directs and produces fiction- and documentary features, as well as national and international tv-, web and cinema commercials

Maité Wokoeck (Germany)

Maite Woköck is CEO and Executive producer at Ella Film. She founded the company in 2016. From 2007 until 2015 Maite Woköck worked as Producer and Script Editor for Ulysses Filmproduktion GmbH in Hamburg. During that time she acquired, developed and financed numerous international co-productions, among them „Totally True Love“ (opening film of the Berlinale Generation 2011) and the animation feature films „Niko – The Way to the Stars“, „Niko 2 – Little Brother, Big Hero“ and „Ooops! Noah is gone…“ In 2011 Maite Woköck developed the Feature film „My Fairy Troublemaker & me“ at the renowned EAVE European Producers Workshop.