07/10/2013 - The Nordisk Film & TV Fond provides top-financing to four Scandinavian productions, including Norwegian director Rasmus A Sivertsen’s Solan and Ludvig’s Christmas

Norwegian director Rasmus A Sivertsen’s return to the Flåklypa/Pinchcliffe universe of Norwegian author and cartoonist Kjell Aukrust Alvdal, Solan and Ludvig’s Christmas (photo), which will open on November 8, has received €250,000 top finance from the Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

The fully-animated film produced by Cornelia Boysen for Maipo revives the nationally beloved characters who featured in the first Aukrust adaption,Norwegian director Ivo Caprino’s Pinchcliffe Grand Prix (1975) which sold an estimated 5.5 million tickets in Norway (population: 4.9 million). In Karsten Fully’s screenplay, Christmas is approaching Pinchcliffe, with certain complications: the world’s most powerful snow gun has ended up in the wrong hands.

Promoting high-quality film and TV productions from the Nordic countries, the Nordisk Film & TV Fond shelled out  €597,000 insupport of four films, also including Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Very Grumpy Old Man. Karukoski, whose love-drama Heart of a Lion [+see also:
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film profile] will reach Finnish screens on October 18, turns to comedy in the depiction of a crabby father recovering from an injury in his daughter’s home, playing an unexpected part in her business negotiations with the Russians. Solar Film’s Markus Selin and Jukka Helle are producing.

Danish pubcaster DR/TV’s Christmas Calendar 2014 was also backed by the fund, this time an action-adventure show by Paul Berg and directed by Kaspar Munk,about a 13-year-old girl, who realizes she can travel in time and this way probably get her divorced parents back together. Swedish-Italian director Erik Gandini’s new documentary after the award-winning Videocracy [+see also:
film review
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film profile], Lost in Perfection, which challenges the image of Scandinavia as an ideal and perfect society, was also favoured.