Kim Basinger is set to take the lead role in Danish writer-director Anders Morgenthaler next feature film Petit which will be shooting mainly in Hamburg this summer.
Morgenthaler’s script centres on a woman in her late 40s who seems to have everything - power, wealth, beauty and love –, yet her life is dominated by an all-consuming desire to have a child.
Canadian actor Jordan Prentice (In Bruges) and German actors Sophie Rois and Sebastian Schipper (seen last year in Tom Tykwer’s Three) are also in the cast.
The co-production between the Zentropa parent company in Denmark, Filmhuset Norge and Zentropa Entertainments Berlin, in association with the young Berlin-based outfit One Two Films, has received backing from the Danish Film Institute and FilmFörderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and will be sold internationally by Trustnordisk. Farbfilm will release the film theatrically in Germany.
Morgenthaler’s previous films include Princess and The Apple and the Worm, while Zentropa Entertainments Berlin’s production record includes Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, Hendrik Handloegten’s Summer Window, and Nikolaj Arcel’s A Royal Affair which is being released in Germany on April 19.
Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily, One Two Films’ co-founder Sol Bondy revealed that principal photography wrapped on April 3 in Israel for Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval’s feature debut Youth as a co-production between Gal Greenspan’s Greenproductions, producer-distributor United King Films and One Two Films.
Shoval’s screenplay focuses on two brothers from a struggling family who decide to kidnap a girl from school and demand a ransom for her release. However, things do not go as they planned.
One Two Films had first come into contact with the project when Greenspan presented Youth within the Script Station programme of the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2010 and they had further discussions a year later when the project was pitched to potential partners at the Talent Project Market as part of the Berlinale Co-Production Market.
In March 2011, Shoval and Greenspan received the awards for Best Project and Best Pitch when presenting Youth in the Plus Minus One section at the Sofia Meetings.
One Two Films subsequently managed to attracted backing from broadcasters ARTE and SR as well as Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg for the project which had been initially supported at the script stage by the Israel Film Fund before receiving further funding from the Rabinovich Film Fund.
The Match Factory will handle international sales on the film which will be released theatrically in Israel by United King Films.
Bondy added that the company’s first completed production Felix Stienz’s debut Doll, The Fatso & Me, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Max Ophüls Prize Film Festival and was selected for the Competition in Sofia, will be the opening film for the Achtung Berlin New Berlin Film Award competition on April 18. The film will be released in German cinemas by Drei Freunde Filmverleih later in 2012.
Meanwhile, €40,000 development funding has been allocated by the German Federal Film Board (FFA) for authors Rolf Basedow and Gabriel Heim to work on the script for the historical melodrama Berlin Balagan about the fate of thousand of Jews who survived the Second World War and gather in post-war Berlin as displaced persons. In this intense, emotional setting, four young people meet and become close friends, helping one another in every situation with courage, charm and chutzpah.
“It’s a time when people are learning to be human beings again, young people, full of vibrant energy willing to live their life no matter what comes,” the producers observe.
One Two Films was founded by Bondy with Jamila Wenske and Christoph Lange in Berlin and Bremen in 2010 to produce films for the international market.
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