Berlin/Hamburg-based producer Malte Grunert is to embark on a third collaboration with director David Mackenzie after being one of the producers on Perfect Sense and You Instead which have both screened at the EFM this week.

Through his company Amusement Park Films, Grunert is developing the adaptation of the Georges Simenon crime novel The Stain On The Snow for which Mackenzie is writing the screenplay and will direct. The Scottish director’s production outfit Sigma Films will co-produce the dark drama which has received development funding from UK Film Council and would be mainly shot at locations in Germany.

In addition, Grunert is developing Heaven On Earth (Himmel auf Erden) which has been developed with Bille August and Lone Scherfig each delivering their takes on the love story set in the mid-1960s between a Danish musician and an East German girl. Development support has come from the FilmFoerderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein and attracted Denmark’s Zentropa and Arthaus as co-producers.

Both projects are in the € 5-8m bracket, while a third as-yet-untitled English language project with UK partners is budgeted at € 10m and due to go before the camera in Hamburg in late summer 2011.

Apart from working on English language European co-productions, Amusement Park is also interested in German language projects. One project in development is Unser Mann in New York to be directed by Florian Baxmeyer from a screenplay written by investigative political journalist/filmmaker Wilfried Huismann.

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