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FUNDING Nordic countries

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond to back six new features

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- Swedish director Jens Jonsson’s €5.6 million Norwegian espionage thriller and Sonja Wigert biopic The Spy is included in the fund’s latest support package

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond to back six new features
A promo shot for Pony and Pigeonboy by Mari Rantasila (© Pohjola-filmi)

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond – the Oslo-based promotional and top-financing fund for film and TV productions from the five Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – has earmarked €1.1 million of production funding for six features, including Swedish director Jens Jonsson’s €5.6 million Norwegian production The Spy (see the news), which received the lion’s share of €300,000.

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Produced by Norway’s Karin Julsrud and Turid Øversveen for 4½ Fiction, with Sweden’s B-Reel and Belgium’s Scope Pictures, and scripted by Norwegian screenwriter Harald Rosenløw Eeg, the film is a spy thriller and a biopic of Norwegian actress Sonja Wigert, who, when World War II broke out, was living in Stockholm and working for the Swedish intelligence. In Norway, where her father was imprisoned, she met Nazi leader Josef Terboven, who recruited her as a German spy. Filming will start in Norway and Belgium in the autumn; Nordisk Film will distribute it in Scandinavia, and Denmark’s TrustNordisk is handling the international sales. 

Another feature-length title set to receive backing is The Sunny Side [+see also:
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, which is being staged by Swedish producer Emma Nyberg, of Solsidan Productions. This will be a film version of the TV4 comedy series of the same name, which Sweden’s largest commercial broadcaster brought to a close in 2015 after five seasons (see the news). Swedish directors Felix Herngren and Måns Herngren, whose The 101-Year-Old Man Who Skipped Out on the Bill and Disappeared [+see also:
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took 700,000 local admissions and was awarded the Audience Guldbagge, Sweden’s national film prize, will be ready for a late 2017 premiere through SF Studios. Also produced by Sweden’s FLX and Jarowsky, it will be sold internationally by SF Studios International.

After his thriller feature debut, Shelley [+see also:
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, Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi will helm Border, for Denmark’s Nina Bisgaard (Meta Film) and Sweden’s Piodor Gustafsson and Petra Jönsson (Spark Film & TV, Kärn Film). Based on a short story by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, the feature follows Tina, a female border patrol officer with a sixth sense for detecting smugglers, and will film from September. She becomes obsessed with finding out what suspicious-looking Vore is hiding in the movie, which Nordisk Film will release in Scandinavia.

Danish directors Thomas Borch Nielsen (Sunshine Barry & the Disco Worms [+see also:
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) and Kirsten Skytte will be supported for their adaptation of Danish author Bjarne Reuter’s best-selling children’s books about Captain Bimse (published between 2002-2006). Produced by Pernille Munk Skydsgaard for 41 Shadows DenmarkCaptain Bimse & the Goggeletten is the story of seven-year-old Anna and her teddy bear, Captain Bimse, who go on an adventure with a pilot, the titular Goggeletten, to save her doll from loneliness in a summer cottage. 

Icelandic actor-director Benedikt Erlingsson, whose feature debut, Of Horses and Men [+see also:
film review
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interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
film profile
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 (2013), won him 21 international prizes, will film Woman at War [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
film profile
]
for Iceland’s Gulldrengurinn and Paris-based Slot Machine. Scripted with Ólafur Egill Egilsson (who penned Baltasar Kormakur’s The Oath [+see also:
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), it will start principal photography next month (July) with Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir in the lead as a woman in her late forties, who declares war on Iceland’s heavy industries. Munich-based Beta Film will handle the international sales. 

Earlier this month, Finnish director Mari Rantasila started production for Pony and Pigeonboy, a family comedy based on Finnish author Veera Salmi’s best-selling series about seven-year-old Pony, who does not want to go to school, and Pigeonboy, who has the answer to any question you might come up with. Finland’s Pohjola-filmi is producing with Cinenord Norway, while B-Plan and Sharing have scheduled the premieres for the two countries for August 2017. Austria’s EastWest Distribution is in charge of the international sales.

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