"WE NEED TO TALK" IN THE CROSSING BORDERS PROGRAMME
Crossing Borders is a training programme, dedicated to documentary film-makers from Europe and Asia. This year, Polish project "We Need To Talk" will participate in it.
Crossing Borders is a programme of trainings and workshops combined with pitching sessions for makers and producers of documentary films from Europe and Asia who develop projects of an international character. During the workshops, the participants work on how to develop their stories, how to get access to and the interest of the international market, how to pitch a given project, and finally, how to make and distribute the finished film.
The workshop is combined with meetings with industry specialists from Europe, Asia and Korea. Within the frames of Crossing Borders, selected projects (a total of 22 films from Europe and Asia) are discussed with other producers, festival selectors, sales agents, representatives of the media. The partners of Crossing Borders are Creative Europe MEDIA, European Documentary Network, Documentary Campus, The Broadcasting Content Promotion Foundation. This year, the tutors are Gitte Hansen (Switzerland), Paul Pauwels (Belgium), Phil Jandaly (Sweden), Zhao Qi (China) Ruby Chen (China) and Steven Seidenberg (Great Britain).
The documentary film project "We Need To Talk" is one of the six European projects which will be developed within the frames of Crossing Borders 2016.
The film's protagonists are people who are in mourning after the death of a loved one and who try to deal with this loss by talking to their dead. However, this "conversation" is not something like a supernatural contact or a séance - this is a confrontation with one's own emotions, confiding one's feelings. This is saying aloud the words which one did not find time to tell the loved one before they passed away.
The film documents the recordings made by the protagonists themselves during the subsequent stages of mourning. "We Need To Talk" is on the one hand a story about coping with grief, saying goodbye to someone important in the lives of the film's protagonists, but at the same time, it is a story about what is changed in our lives by the experience of death? What does it initiate? Does it help us to realise something? It is a story about love, the meaning of life, happiness, closeness, about the gradual discovery of strength in oneself.
Jędrzej Michalak is the director and the author of the script, the film's producers are Daria Maślona and Stanisław Zaborowski (Silver Frame).