08/03/2016 - The Swedish Film Institute is providing production funding for Per Fly’s Backstabbing for Beginners, Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton Incident and Turid Rogne’s Democracy Road

Danish director Per Fly, whose latest feature, 2013's Waltz for Monica [+see also:
trailer
interview: Edda Magnason
interview: Per Fly
film profile], was a biopic on Swedish singer-actress Monica Zetterlund, will receive Swedish support for his new feature, Backstabbing for Beginners. The first production for Denmark’s Creative Alliance, a Copenhagen company launched in 2013 by Fly, directors Lone Scherfig, Ole Christian Madsen, Dagur Kári, and producers Nikolaj Vibe Michelsen and Malene Blenkov, will be co-produced by Sweden’s Eyeworks Scandi Fiction and has been included in the Swedish Film Institute’s latest production funding package.

Scripted by US screenwriter Daniel Payne and Fly, Danish former UN employee and whistle-blower Michael Soussan’s efforts to disclose corruption in the innermost circles of the United Nations will star British actors Theo James (as Soussan) and Ben Kingsley, and will be produced by Blenkov, with Lars Knudsen (Parts & Labor). 

Egyptian-Swedish director Tarik Saleh will be backed to the tune of €1.9 million for The Nile Hilton Incident [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tarik Saleh
film profile], a noir thriller based on the 2008 murder of the Lebanese winner of a pop-idol show at a hotel in Dubai. An Egyptian businessman and politician who had been dumped by the star turned out to be the killer, and the affair shook the whole country. Swedish actor Fares Fares will play the lead.

Norwegian director Turid Rogne (and producer Elisabeth Kleppe, of Aldeles) were also bankrolled for their feature-length documentary Democracy Road, which follows two journalists from Myanmar who are living in exile in Norway. After 20 years, they decide to go back to test the limits of the country’s newfound democracy: they have dreamt of this for so long, but the struggle for freedom is far from over.