04/08/2003

Fifteen years’ worth of film history went up in smoke – literally – when a fire broke out in the Swedish distributor Triangelfilm’s offices in Malmö on the night of Wednesday 30 July. Firefighters worked through the night and only managed to put the flames out on Thursday morning. Unfortunately, the 380 features films and prints were ashes. The only prints saved were the ones Triangelfilm had donated to the Swedish Filmmarket in Stockholm and those currently being programmed in Sweden at the Sture and Folkets Bio cinema circuits.
Matthias Nohrborg, head of acquisitions at Triangel said that the fire was a disaster for the Swedish film industry as a whole because the losses include Sweden’s only prints of Krysztof Kieslowski’s Blue and Decalogue, Lars von Trier’s The Waves of Destiny, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen and Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies, but the total loss has not as yet been fully quantified. Police have begun an official investigation.