14/05/2016 - CANNES 2016: This venture will mark a new strategy for the Danish major, as it plans to head directly into the US market with English-language films

Danish major Nordisk Film has signed up Danish director Asger Leth to make White Dog, a “tense and vicious” English-language drama, which will shoot on location in the USA, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from an original script by Danish director Martin Zandvliet and writer Anders August.

“White Dog takes place in Pittsburgh, but it is just as much a portrait of a time when populist politicians everywhere are appealing to the worst in us,” said Leth yesterday (13 May) at the Cannes International Film Festival, where he presented “the study in power, where loyalty, guilt and revenge lead to an unwavering and definitive outcome”.

Zandvliet and August have set their story in a post-9/11 society, where bigotry and racism are becoming mainstream. It portrays two skinhead brothers who are about to take different directions in a world that is ruled by a dog-eat-dog logic of white supremacy and urban gangbangers.

White Dog marks a new strategy for the Nordic company – venturing directly into the US market with English-language films. “We have the talent, the stories and the ambition to compete at an international level – with Leth, Zandvliet and 'August Dog', we have a hard-hitting package that is bound to attract interest,” said Nordisk producer Mikael Rieks.

Nordisk Film Production also staged Zandvliet’s award-winning Land of Mine [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Louis Hofmann
interview: Martin Zandvliet
film profile] (2015) and Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s A War [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tobias Lindholm
film profile] (2015), which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign-language Film. Both films were sold worldwide and successfully released in the USA.

Leth most recently (in 2012) directed Move On, a Danish-German feature starring Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, and the US crime-thriller Man on a Ledge, with Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks and Jamie Bell in the leads. His 2006 documentary Ghosts of Cité Soleil won the Cinema Eye Honors Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production.