Support Bloom: a Serbian short childhood film tale

We lost all of the funding for our short film Bloom and we have a short time to crowdfund it before it’s too late to film it.

I am Tamara, a screenwriter and director from Serbia who is raising funds to produce a short film Bloom, set in a village in Western Serbia where I spent summers in my childhood. The money will cover travel, equipment rental, props, wardrobe, cast and crew expenses and post-production. Every contribution goes directly toward making this film possible and helping it reach international film festivals later.

What is Bloom about?

"In the summer of 2004, eight-year-old Sara leaves the city for her grandma’s village where a local friend, Vesna, introduces her to the secrets of life. At night, the two young girls secretly follow Vesna's older teenage sister Anica as she meets up with a mysterious guy from another village. Drawn by the hypnotizing aura of their secret meetings and influenced by her grandma’s stories, Sara starts to suspect Anica’s boyfriend might be a vampire."

Watch the mood video here: vimeo.com/1084379629

Why the urgency to fund the film now?

The images you see here are from our test shooting on real locations with our actors, taken in 2024 two weeks before the actual shooting was supposed to take place.

After the production of the film was stopped for reasons beyond our control and we parted ways with the production company that was representing the film, we lost all of our funding (Bloom had previosly recieved production grants for short films from Film Center Serbia, MEDIA Creative Europe and Région Normandie Film Fund. It was a serbian representative at Euro Connection at prestigius Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival and it won the main award at European Short Pitch, granted by Région Bretagne, as well as five other film development awards - at Balkan Short Film Market in Albania in 2022, Lights On Award at ShorTS Development & Pitching Training in Italy in 2022, Best Pitch at Bašta Fest Serbia 2021, Vox Feminae Film Festival and Tabor Film Festival, both in Croatia in 2021).

Why crowdunding and not applying to grants once again?

Film grant opportunities in Serbia are not open at this moment in Serbia, due political instability which has caused shifts in cultural domain as well. The main cast in our film are kids who are just at the right age for this film to be shot now, and the film's story takes place in summer - we don't have any more time to go back to financing the film through standard means because the time to shoot it is now, and from artistic point of view, we are more than ready to get into it.

We are very thankful to anyone who decides to support our vision and promise to make you proud that you supported exactly this film.

Whatever the size of your donation, your name will be in the credits as a thank you for supporting the film.

If you wish to make offline donations or other kinds of support, you can contact us directly.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and helping this film come to life.

Yours,

Bloom team