02/02/2012

Two Swedish veteran directors relieved the Swedish Film Institute of almost a month’s production funding, as Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and Lasse Hallström (pictured)’s The Hypnotist received €1.3 million and €1.2m respectively from a total allotment of €3.2m for four features, four shorts and documentaries.

Swedish visual artist Anna Odell was provided with €300,000 for her feature debut, Anne Odell Untitled, to be produced by Mathilde Dedye for French Quarter Film. Also scripted by Odell “in the grey area between fact and fiction, the film reflects group dynamics and hierarchies, examining the issues of belonging and identity”.

A minor grant (€16,000) went to former painter turned documentary film-maker Rebecka Rasmusson’s feature-length Woman in the Woods, which she will herself produce for Themisfits Film. Edit, a deaf-mute woman, spent her entire life in a forest cottage with her animals, until she died in 2010, aged 92. Rasmusson began to investigate her story, as if for a detective story, and came up with “a powerful portrait of a woman, her distressing fate and vulnerability”. Concluding his Living trilogy launched by his Cannes winner, Songs from the Second Floor (2001), followed by You, the Living [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pernilla Sandström
interview: Roy Andersson
film profile] (2007), Andersson follows a pigeon, sitting in a tree and overlooking a snow landscape crowded with people – ”amazed that they do not see the chaos getting closer and closer”, says the director. ”Three encounters with death” is his description of the film, produced by Pernilla Sandström, for Roy Andersson Filmproduktion AB, which will be ready for 2014.

In production since last month (January), Hallström’s The Hypnotist will spearhead a series of films from Lars Kepler’s crime novels, among the post-Millennium bestsellers. Mikael Persbrandt stars with Lena Olin and Tobias Zilliacus as police detective Joona Linna, investigating the brutal murder of a whole family in suburban Stockholm. Produced by Börje Hansson, Peter Possne and Bertil Ohlsson for Svensk Filmindustri AB-Sonet Film AB, the film will open this autumn.