07/11/2014 - Production funding has been secured for the new films by Erik Skjoldbjærg and Henrik Ruben Genz – and two Swedish documentaries

Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjærg, who most recently made the award-winning North Sea thriller Pioneer [+see also:
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film profile] (2013), switches from water to fire in Pyromaniac, his new film about an arsonist who terrorises a small community – and another inferno lurks underneath the surface, when a local policeman discovers that the culprit is not a stranger, but a village fireman. 

Scripted by Norwegian writer Bjørn Olaf Johannessen from Gaute Heivoll’s novel, Pyromaniac will go into production next year for Norway’s Pravda Film, co-produced by Sweden’s Bleck Film & TV, and it is one of the four new features that the Swedish Film Institute has endowed with a total of €430,000 worth of production funding.

Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz’s Tordenskiold [+see also:
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film profile] (see article), starring Norwegian actor Jakob Oftebro as the Norwegian-Danish vice-admiral and naval hero who was more or less unemployed after the Great Northern War ended in 1721, will also be supported. Sweden’s Anagram Film & TV will co-produce the film, which is staged by Lars Bredo Rahbek for Denmark’s Nimbus Film. 

The institute will also back two Swedish full-length documentaries: Nur Tutal and Iván Blanco’s Transfobia, from Stina Gardell, of Mantaray Film; and Frida Kempff’s Winter Buoy, from David Herdies, of Momento Film. 

Transfobia depicts the unique friendship between the film’s director, Nur, who has moved from Kurdistan, and Rashan, who lives as a refugee in her own country because of her sexual orientation. Meanwhile, Winter Buoy follows a group of nurses in an ice-cold Toronto, as they struggle to give socially vulnerable pregnant women the chance for a new life with their newborn babies.