26/01/2011

Last week, Matthias Glasner started shooting in Hammerfest, Norway, on his latest film, Mercy. It is scripted by Danish screenwriter of the moment Kim Fupz Aakeson (whose recent hits on the European screen include two films in competition at last year’s Berlinale, Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Family [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Hans Petter Moland’s Norwegian title A Somewhat Gentle Man [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hans Petter Moland
film profile]).

For his latest morally disturbing tale, the director of unsettling film The Free Will has reunited with his favourite actor Jürgen Vogel, who stars alongside Austrian actress Birgit Minichmayr (Silver Bear at Berlin in 2009 for her role in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maren Ade
film profile]). They play a couple who have left Germany and begun a new life in Norway, near the polar circle. A few months after their arrival, she causes an accident and flees, but paradoxically, this grave secret binds the couple together.

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Mercy is a German/Norwegian co-production between Schwarzweiss Film, Knudsen & Streuber Medienmanufaktur, ophir film, Neofilm and ZDF/ARTE. It is backed by the Norwegian Film Institute, the German Culture Ministry, federal film fund DFFF and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. In Germany, the film will be distributed by Alamode Filmverleih.

(Translated from French)