09/07/2009

Anne Fontaine’s biopic Coco Before Chanel [+see also:
trailer
film profile], starring Audrey Tatou, is the major beneficiary in the latest round of distribution funding from the UK Film Council’s (UKFC) Prints and Advertising Fund. Optimum Releasing received £125,000 to widen the release of the film from 50 to 90 screens, towards advertising expenditure and to create a new trailer.

Several smaller awards of £5,000 were also made:

Poisson Rouge Pictures for The Hide, the debut feature from director Marek Losey; New Wave Films for Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously [+see also:
trailer
film profile]; Universal Pictures for the digital re-release of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus; Axiom Films for Sugar, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s follow-up to their debut feature Half Nelson; Axiom Films for Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River; Soda Pictures for Andreas Dresen’s Cloud 9 [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and for Ursula Meier’s Home [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kacey Mottet Klein
interview: Thierry Spicher
interview: Ursula Meier
film profile], starring Isabelle Huppert; Dogwoof Ltd for Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ, and for the documentary The Yes Men Fix The World,, a true story directed by Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno and Kurt Engfehr; and ICA Films for Anthony Fabian’s Skin [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

In addition, Guerilla Films received £4,940 for Charles Dickens’s England, a documentary presented by Derek Jacobi, and Drakes Avenue Pictures received £4,550 for Göran Olsson’s music documentary Am I Black Enough For You.

The UK is one of the most expensive countries in the world in which to release films, with the average number of prints for a foreign language specialist film being under ten. The UKFC’s P&A Fund spends £4 million annually to widen access to such films and also more commercially focused British films that are otherwise difficult to market compared to a Hollywood blockbuster.