11/07/2014 - Levan Akin’s adaptation of an award-winning novel is one of seven new features supported by the Swedish Film Institute

Swedish director Levan Akin will follow up on his feature debut, Certain People (2011), with The Circle [+see also:
trailer
film profile], an adaptation of the award-winning novel The Circle, a fantasy-horror mystery by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren about a group of Swedish teenage witches chosen to save the world.

Scripted by Akin and Elfgren, to be produced by Cecilia Norman Mardell, Benny Andersson and Ludvig Andersson for RMV Film, the project has received a top €1 million slice of production funding from the Swedish Film Institute, which has allocated a total of €3.1 million to seven new features. 

Set in the fictional town of Bergslagen in central Sweden, the film starts at an abandoned folkpark, to which six teenage girls have been drawn by a mysterious force. They are the “elect”, witches with magical forces who, despite their differences, must learn to work together to save the world from an otherworldly evil.

Swedish director Axel Petersén, whose first feature, Avalon [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2011), won the international critics’ FIPRESCI Award at Toronto, is now preparing Under the Pyramid [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a film about art smuggling that takes place in Scandinavia, Tel Aviv and Egypt. Petersén has himself scripted the adventure-thriller, which Erika Wasserman (who also staged Avalon) will produce for Idyll.

The Swedish Film Institute will also support Danish director Susanne Bier’s new drama, A Second Chance (see news), which is co-produced by Madeleine Ekman of Zentropa International Sweden, and two documentaries: Ulf Hultberg’s The Art of Killing a Politician (produced by Hultberg, for Original Film) and Stefan Berg’s Who the F-k Is Stefan Berg? (Berg, for Berg Images).