Love Is All You Need: First Danish top entry on Lido in 22 years

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

27/07/2012 - Her Oscar for In a Better World was Denmark’s first in 23 years, and Danish director Susanne Bier is back with a romantic comedy starring Irish actor Pierce Brosnan and Danish actress Trine Dyrholm

When Danish director Susanne Bier’s Love Is All You Need [+see also:
trailer
film profile] unspools for the first time at the 69th Venice Film Festival (between August 29-September 8), it is the first Danish film in 22 years selected for the main programme on the Lido. Her most recent feature, In a Better World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2010) – for which she was named Best Director at the European Film Awards – became Denmark’s first Oscar-winner in 23 years (after Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror in 1988).

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Bier’s first romantic comedy since local blockbuster The One and Only 12 years ago, the Vibeke Windeløv-Sisse Graum Jørgensen production for Zentropa Entertainments was scripted – as usual – by Anders Thomas Jensen, follows two very different families gathering for a wedding in an old villa at Sorrento, Italy.

Irish actor Pierce Brosnan stars as a businessman with an eye for lemons and vegetables, and Danish actress Trine Dyrholm as a cancer-stricken woman who has lost her hair and left her husband, in a cast that also includes Christiane Schaumburg-Müller, Paprika Steen, Molly Egelind and Kim Bodnia.

When London’s Arrow Film Distributors signed for UK distribution at Cannes, Denmark’s TrustNordisk international sales closed its books on the €5.5 million feature, having licensed it worldwide. Nordisk Film A/S is in charge of Scandinavian release and has scheduled the Danish premiere for September 6.

Meanwhile, Bier has finished shooting Serena – her second Hollywood movie, after Things We Lost in the Fire (2007) - in Prague, with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper in the leads. Set during the Great Depression (1929-30) the adaption of US author Ron Rash’s 2008 novel – which she took over from American director Darren Aronofsky – follows Serena and her new husband, who leave Boston for the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire. The launch is set for autumn 2013.