The Atlantic Film Festival, this year running Sept. 14-22 in Halifax, has confirmed that Canada, Spain and Latin America will be the focus of its Strategic Partners conference.

This year’s conference will bring in filmmakers and deal-makers from Spain and the Latin American countries to talk shop and, if all goes to plan, lay the groundwork for some future coproductions.

‘It’s the fourth year so we were trying to come up with the next logical step,’ says imX communication’s Ann Bernier, Strategic Partners’ producer for a second year. ‘We had quite a bit of interest on the part of Canadian producers who are already looking for partners in Spain or Latin America. We chose both, more to go with the Spanish theme.’

Registered delegates from Spain and Latin America send in a corporate profile as well as a list of projects in development for which they hope to find a Canadian partner. Canadian companies review the projects and select titles that are of interest to them. Strategic Partners co-ordinators then play matchmaker between the participating companies, inviting the visiting producers to select the Canadian companies they wish to meet with one-on-one.

‘The more people you talk to about this, the more people you find saying they like the interactivity and the fact that it is not 500 people all trying to meet each other,’ says Bernier. ‘This is a small group of between 80 to 100 people that actually get to spend three full days talking.’

There will also be two panel discussions featured on the final day of the conference. The first panel will dissect a recent coproduction by Canadian and Spanish partners, with the producers talking about their experiences making the film. The second panel explores the distribution and marketing of foreign-language films.

The Strategic Partnership portion of the AFF will be held at the Lord Nelson Hotel Sept. 15-17. It is being sponsored by Telefilm Canada, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, imX and The Motion Picture Bond Company.

Bernier is also producing this year’s Industry Series. Although nothing has been confirmed, she says there will likely be seminars on music rights, channeling your documentary south of the border, classic animation versus Flash animation and ‘technical reality.’

In other AFF news, the writers selected to participate in the Scripts Out Loud program are Deanne Foley, Sean Kelly, Warren Jefferies and Tony Sekulich. *

-www.atlanticfilm.com