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FUNDING Nordic countries

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond supports Ted – Show Me Love, The Guardian Angel

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- New features by Hannes Holm and Arto Halonen, as well as two documentaries and two TV series, will benefit from Nordic funding

The Nordisk Film & TV Fond supports Ted – Show Me Love, The Guardian Angel
Finnish director-producer Arto Halonen

The Oslo-based Nordisk Film & TV Fond has allocated €1 million for six new projects – more than 25% of which has gone to Swedish director Hannes Holm’s Ted – Show Me Love (aka Ted – read the news), the biopic of legendary Swedish singer-songwriter Ted Gärdestad, which will shoot from February 2017. 

Scripted by award-winning Swedish screenwriter Peter Birro, the film about the pop artist who rose to fame in the 1970s will star Swedish actor-musician Adam Pålsson; Birro also wrote Danish director Per Fly’s Waltz for Monica [+see also:
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interview: Edda Magnason
interview: Per Fly
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, produced by StellaNova Film’s Lena Rehnberg, who will also stage Ted with Cecilia Forsberg-Becker, alongside Swedish regional film centre Film Väst, Nordisk Film and TV4. The top-drawer crew includes Swedish cinematographer Göran Hallberg, who lensed Felix Herngren’s The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared [+see also:
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, as well as the film’s Swedish make-up artists Eva von Bahr and Love Larson, who were Oscar-nominated for their work. TrustNordisk handles international sales of the film, which will be delivered in late 2017.

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Finnish director-producer Arto Halonen has 29 films under his belt, most of which are documentaries – his latest, White Rage (2015), was selected for several festivals, including Thessaloniki, and was awarded at Warsaw’s Millennium Docs Against Gravity showcase. His third fiction feature, The Guardian Angel [+see also:
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, will be backed by the Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The fund describes it as “a psychological suspense drama about a man who uses hypnosis to turn another man into a robber and a murderer. A young police investigator is sent into a world of psychological manipulation.” Halonen will himself produce for Finland’s Art Film.

Swedish-Iranian writer-director Nima Sarvestani has been supported for the documentary Prison Sisters, a follow-up to his No Burqas Behind Bars, which he shot at an Afghan women’s prison in 2012. His new doc, which will be launched in the Masters section of Amsterdam’s upcoming IDFA, follows two of the inmates after their release: Sara escapes to Sweden, while Najjibeh is forced to stay in the Taliban nest. Maryam Ebrahimi produced for Sarvestani’s Nima Film (which he founded in 1987), Folkets Bio will handle the local release, and Germany’s Deckert Distribution is in charge of international sales. The director’s 2014 documentary Those Who Said No won a Golden Nymph in the Current Affairs category at the 56th Monte-Carlo TV Festival earlier this year. 

Produced in association with Danish pubcaster DR, Somalian-born director Nasib Farah and Danish director Søren Steen Jespersen secured a subsidy for their documentary Lost Warriors [+see also:
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, about young Somali men who grew up in the West and ended up in their old country as lost warriors for the jihadist terrorist group Al-Shabaab. They now have a problem: should they return to their Western country and face imprisonment, likely deportation, or try to build a new life in Somalia, under constant threat of being killed by Al-Shabaab? Lost Warriors was produced by Helle Faber for Made in Copenhagen, and the theatrical release is slated for next year. DR International Sales is in charge of foreign distribution and has already signed contracts with numerous broadcasters. 

Two television series were also taken into account: Danish director Siri Melchior’s 26x5-minute animated children’s series Rita & the Crocodile, produced by Marie Bro for Denmark’s Tegnefilm, and Swedish director Felix Herngren’s10x45-minute family drama-comedy The Bonus Family - Season 2, staged by Frida Asp for Sweden’s FLX

The pilot for Rita & the Crocodile received the Jury Prize at the Annecy Film Festival in 2015; the series about a very determined four-year-old called Rita, who is used to having things her way, has been pre-sold to Denmark’s DR, Sweden’s SVT, Norway’s NRK, Finland’s YLE, France’s Canal+ and Germany’s RBB, among others. France’s Dandaloo is selling it.

Starring Erik Johansson, Vera Vitali, Petra Mede and Frank Dorsin, the first season of The Bonus Family – following a recomposed family and the complications that go along with it – is yet to be aired by SVT, DR, NRK, YLE and Iceland’s RUV. Herngren started filming the second series in September, and it will wrap in February 2017.

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