11/04/2012 - As the Famous Five-inspired Fünf Freunde approaches the one-million mark at the box office, SamFilm and distributor Constantin set forth on new adventures.

After the success of Fünf Freunde (lit. “Five friends”) by Mike Marzuk, a film produced by Munich-based family-film specialist SamFilm (who also produced the The Wild Soccer Bunch series) and released by Constantin in over 450 German cinemas on January 26, the film’s producer-distributor duo have decided to throw themselves together into new cinematographic adventures.

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The pair’s latest adaptation of the adventures of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five is about to pass the one-million mark atthe German box office (with over €5m in receipts) and is among the year’s top ten films so far. It’s definitely enough to give them the confidence to make a sequel, Fünf Freunde 2, to be directed again by Marzuk and to be finished next summer in order to be released in 2013.

Another project to be produced by SamFilm and distributed by Constantin will follow the same timetable: a film about the friendship between a little girl and a horse titled Ostwind for which producers Ewa Karlström and Andreas Ulmke-Smeaton will work again with screenwriters Lea Schmidbauer and Kristina Magdalena Henn who co-wrote the romantic comedy Single by Contract [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Marc Rothemund. With Ostwind, Katja von Garnier, a director keen on female characters, will return to directing a film in her mother tongue. After her first feature, Bandits (1997), she had embarked on an American adventure (with Iron Jawed Angels, a film about American suffragettes, in 2004) and a Roumanian one (Blood and Chocolate, 2007).

(Translated from French)