Your industry
Being Art and Industry, intimate and social, escapist, and confrontational
cinema is, in its mysterious transparency, an oxymoron par excellence.
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We remain committed to contributing to the development and growth of the Industry in our region in all areas: development, production, distribution, and sales. We are clear that our geographical position and presence make up a perfect platform for us to contribute to the growth of our filmmakers’ careers through this forum.
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Pituka Ortega de Heilbron
President of the Board of Directors
Being Art and Industry, intimate and social, escapist, and confrontational
cinema is, in its mysterious transparency, an oxymoron par excellence.
“We remain committed to contributing to the development and growth of the Industry in our region in all areas: development, production, distribution, and sales. We are clear that our geographical position and presence makes a perfect platform for us to contribute to the growth of our filmmakers’ careers through our programs and funds.”
Pituka Ortega de Heilbron
President of the Board of Directors
Silence on set! … Run sound… Speed… Final clapperboard… Run camera… Running…
ACTION!
PRIMERA MIRADA
Primera Mirada is a fund dedicated to film projects in the post-production stage and whose main objective is to strengthen the growing audiovisual industry in our region.
TRAINING
Although your Foundation carries out Industry activities throughout the year, your Festival dedicates part of its programming to specific Industry activities at the Festival, such as workshops, talks and master classes, sometimes aimed at experienced filmmakers, at others at our audience. in general, or to specific groups such as adolescents and young people and even girls and boys.
Our Festival Industry enriches its knowledge with the experiences of distinguished representatives of the international film industry, establishing safe spaces that nurture new possibilities for inspiration, development, production, marketing, and distribution of projects, or simply to enjoy and learn about cinema.
Based on our consultation with 188 professional filmmakers from Panama, Central America and the Caribbean at the beginning of 2021, IFF Panama ForCinema —or ForCinema simply— seeks to increase access to training for small creative businesses and complementary film services in our region on topics film production, distribution and marketing technicians, as well as business acceleration mechanisms and development of their entrepreneurial skills to better collaborate and compete in the Latin American film industry.
Our virtual and face-to-face training sessions, carried out in strategic alliance with the Innovation Laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, BID Lab, are aimed at both emerging filmmakers and professionals who wish to expand and/or update their knowledge to face an ever-increasing film market. increasingly competitive and demanding in the region. We will seek the greatest possible diversity and equity among our participants.
In this way, we intend to consolidate an educational program that empowers, updates, and professionalizes the cinematographic sector of Panama, Central America, and the Caribbean to contribute to the development and integration of our national cinematography’s and promote the construction of an industry with strong identity and economic sustainability.
For more information, please contact Your Industry at: industria@iffpanama.ong
CO-PRODUCTION
Let’s be honest: cinema is a caring company, both in time and space and in technical and financial resources. Alliances and collaborations are essential to access, confront and democratize this costly medium.
With this in mind and with the support of the BID LAB, in 2020 we launched the most complete co-production forum for Central America and the Caribbean under the title IFF Panama Film Match: Central America and the Caribbean Co-Production Forum, as a counterpart of Industry to your Panama International Film Festival.
Filmmakers from Panama, Central America and the Caribbean who have a fiction, documentary or hybrid project —that is, all of the above— in the development stage may apply to this dynamic Forum to deepen their knowledge of tools for accessing funds, markets and international film festivals, and present your… how else to say it, your baby to potential co-producers, partners, investors, international sales agents, distributors and other international professionals and experts in the Industry, to bring their projects to fruition.
For this, IFF Panama Film Match organizes personalized meetings between pairs of producers and directors from the region and decision makers from the film industry, with the aim of strengthening the projects and their presentations to various markets and, ideally, establishing significant alliances to priori.
To lead by example, during the IFF Panama Film Match and on behalf of your Foundation and the BID LAB, an independent international jury chooses one or more participating projects to endorse them with USD 10,000 in prizes or honorable mentions, in the categories and in the amounts that said jury considers pertinent.
Find out more by contacting us at industry@iffpanama.ong.
FUNDING
Su Mirada
In 2019 your IFF Panama Foundation created the first specific fund for women filmmakers in our region of Central America and the Caribbean, unfortunately unique in the region, under the pertinent name Su Mirada.
Su Mirada seeks to level and thus strengthen the participation of women in the region’s industry through a cash fund that supports female filmmakers from Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Haiti. Whether they are directors with extensive experience or emerging filmmakers, Su Mirada seeks to ensure their presence in productions and theaters.
To this end, Su Mirada provides cash prizes of USD 15,000, divided into two categories: USD 5,000 for a project in the development phase and USD 10,000 for a project in the post-production phase. These prizes are awarded by our accomplice in this adventure, the Inter-American Development Bank, BID.
Su Mirada aims to the female perspective in fiction, documentary, hybrid, experimental or animation feature films, as long as they have an authorial and social perspective on issues of gender, racism, discrimination, human rights, and the environment.
Find out more by contacting us at industry@iffpanama.ong.
Primera Mirada
Have you held a newborn living being in your hands? Without exaggerating and, of course, completely exaggerating: that is the fragility and at the same time the promise of a film in its first edition cut.
That is why your Foundation and Festival, in its blind faith in and continuous desire to strengthen the growing audiovisual industry in our region and thus be the platform par excellence for the development of its projects, founded Primera Mirada seven years ago, a fund dedicated to bringing good term those works in post-production stage.
Various top-level international juries have shared with numerous applicants their appreciation of their work in the privacy of small projection rooms, awarding one or more of them part or all their prize. All this thanks to the support of our partner in this project, the Inter-American Development Bank. Because our development is born and depends on how we perceive, imagine, and understand ourselves through our visual and sound images.
Find out more by contacting us at industry@iffpanama.ong.
SPECIAL PROJECTS
Even long before its official birth on December 28, 1895 at the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, as well as throughout its history, cinema and its technology have always been evolving. Because cinema is life and life are evolution, after all.
With this in mind, in 2020 your Foundation and the BID LAB, our great ally, decided to launch the Humanity in Virtual Reality program, calling for film proposals to be developed in virtual reality or VR —yes, that vision and manifestation of cinema in which you put an entire theater room on your face in the form of a viewer—in the framework of the program of new technologies in the audiovisual industry.
Our jury chose the project Mosquito: history of a wound by Panamanian filmmaker Ana Elena Tejera, which was brought to fruition with our support and premiered at our 10th IFF Panama Festival in 2021.
With Humanity in Virtual Reality, we continue to consolidate the innovation and technology pillar of your Foundation and Festival, promoting the audiovisual potential of new technologies to communicate stories with high social impact.
