The recently created Saint-Petersburg-based Point Of View (Pov) Development Fund has backed three film projects a total of $86,000 (€65,000).

An international expert group of producers that selected the projects included Sergei Selyanov (Ctb Film Company), Artem Vasiliev (Metrafilms), Riina Sildos (Amrion), Konstantinos Kontovrakis (Heretic) and Berlin-based sales agent Jean-Christophe Simon of Films Boutique.

The films they selected each have the fate of a woman at their centre:

The Woman From Ingria, to be produced by Pavel Odynin, is based on the biography of a simple woman in the north-western corner of Russia during the 20th century (€25,000);

Svetlana follows the real love story between Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva and the Indian raj Brajesh Singh in the mid-1960s. It will be produced by Anastasia Perova, Olga Kolegaeva and Konstantin Nafikov with Karsten Stöter of Germany’s Rohfilm,which was a co-producer of Ritesh Batra’s Cannes hit The Lunchbox (€25,000);

Manifestation, the feature debut by Georgian-born film-maker Anna Sarukhanova