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BOX OFFICE Denmark

Denmark racks up 1.6 million admissions in 2016 – Zentropa accounts for 1.2 million

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- A Conspiracy of Faith has sold 700,000 tickets, The Commune more than 300,000, and The Day Will Come has just passed 200,000

Denmark racks up 1.6 million admissions in 2016 – Zentropa accounts for 1.2 million
Fares Fares and Nikolaj Lie Kaas in A Conspiracy of Faith

Nine new Danish films premiered in 2016 have so far recorded 1.6 million admissions – and three produced by Zentropa Entertainments (owned by Nordisk Film, Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen) account for 1.2 million of them: Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s A Conspiracy of Faith [+see also:
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has sold 700,000 tickets, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune [+see also:
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interview: Thomas Vinterberg
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more than 300,000, and Jesper W Nielsen’s The Day Will Come [+see also:
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has just passed 200,000 in under five months.

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Aalbæk Jensen, who recently left his CEO position with the company (read the news) to a collective management comprising Anders Kjærhauge, Frederik Nemeth, Rikke Ennis, Louise Vesth and Sisse Graum Jørgensen, still has a production running: Danish director Peter Schønau Fog’s adaptation of Christian Jungersen’s award-winning 2012 novel You Disappear [+see also:
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interview: Peter Schønau Fog
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, which will be premiered in February 2017 and stars Sweden’s Michael Nyqvist, and Denmark’s Trine Dyrholm and Nikolaj Lie Kaas in the leads.

Zentropa has so far filmed three of Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s best-selling thrillers, published between 2007 and 2009: The Keeper of Lost Causes [+see also:
film review
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interview: Eugenio Mira
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(2013), The Absent One [+see also:
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(2014), both by Danish director Mikkel Nørgaard, and which lured 1.5 million Danes into the cinemas, and A Conspiracy of Faith, all three adapted by Danish writer-director Nikolaj Arcel. Aalbæk Jensen originally purchased the rights for four Adler-Olsen novels: The Purity of Vengeance (aka Guilt – 2010) is currently in pre-production and will be the last instalment in the Department Q franchise from the company.

The author did not attend the premiere of A Conspiracy of Faith, and for contractual reasons he has not commented on the franchise in four years; inside sources quoted by the local press say that he had thought he would be asked to write, or at least co-write, the scripts for the films, as well as having an influence on the style and casting, but Zentropa was not interested in his participation. Adler-Olsen has since written three books about detective superintendent Carl Mørck, his sidekick Assad and their assistant Rose. 

In A Conspiracy of Faith, Mørck, Assad and Rose, who work in a special department within the Copenhagen Police, specialising in “cases of special focus”, or “cold cases” – and who are played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Swedish actor Fares Fares and Johanne Louise Schmidt – are digging into several disappearances of women in 1987, apparently connected to a certain person called Nete Hermansen, and a special institution on the small island of Sprogø, where the state sent “undesirable women” right up to the 1960s. But not everybody is interested in lifting the lid on past events.

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