19/05/2008

Yesterday, at Film i Väst’s fourth press gathering in Cannes, Sweden’s leading film production centre presented its 28 films co-produced in 2008. Twelve of them are non-Swedish majority co-productions.

Those include the Spanish film Neon Flesh, starring Victoria Abril, produced by Morena Film; the first co-production with Russia, Newsmakers, by Swedish filmmaker Anders Banke (Frostbite [+see also:
trailer
film profile]); and a remake of Johnny To’s action film Breaking News, produced and written by Sam Klebanov.

The other minority Swedish co-productions are the award-winning Hungarian film The Investigator by Attila Gigor; Russian film Dau by Ilya Khrzhanovsky; Norwegian film Pax by Annette Sjursen; Finnish film Blackouts by Saara Saarela; Irish film Alarm by Gerard Stembridge; and five Danish films produced by Zentropa, including Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, and Annette K. Olesen’s Little Soldier.

“We want to make Film i Väst the centre of post-production facilities in Scandinavia,” said Zentropa co-founder Peter Aalbæk Jensen. “We have also established a Swedish production subsidiary at Film i Väst’s Trollhättan studios, Trollhättan AB, as part of our aim to create a European mini-studio in Northern European countries, with other Zentropa production branches in Germany, Holland, France and the UK.”

Among the major Swedish films are Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth (whose first footage was shown yesterday at a private screening), Tarik Saleh’s animated film Metropia [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Jens Jonsson’s new project Samurai Summer, set to start shooting this summer.

“Our line-up of films is 50% Swedish and 50% non-Swedish,” Film i Väst’s CEO Tomas Eskilsson told Cineuropa. “For 2008, our two main objectives are to develop our animation facilities and to strengthen our evaluation system. We want to reflect on our ability to make films that reach a wider audience both nationally and internationally.”