Festival veteran Lissy Bellaiche has been appointed head of sales for I/S Danske Filmproducenter, a company handling Nordic TV-rights for an extensive catalogue comprising many hundreds of Danish films from production outfits like Nordisk Film, Sandrew Metronome, Scanbox, Crone Film, Palladium and Dagmar Film.

Bellaiche headed the Danish Film Institute's festival department for 20 years before she became festival coordinator for Zentropa-owned Trust Film Sales in February 2000. In addition to her new position, she will continue to handle promotion of Trust's slate at the major festivals like Cannes, Berlin and Venice.

Bellaiche has been a frequent jury-member at a growing number of festivals around the world, including San Sebastian, Berlin, Istanbul and recently Karlovy Vary. Bellaiche replaces Susanne Teilmann, who has become head of programming at broadcaster TV3.

Historically, I/S Danske Filmproducenter had all but monopolized the handling of TV-rights for Danish films until this summer when progressive local production outfits, Zentropa, Nimbus Film, M&M Productions and Regner Grasten Film, joined forces to create the new TV-sales company OS.

"It has been our experience, that Danish production companies haven't been good enough at getting the most out of their TV-rights," producer Kim Magnusson (M&M Productions) told Screendaily at the time. OS handles sales of all second-run TV-rights in the Nordic region for all films from the four companies, a catalogue of some 100 titles including films from award-winning directors like Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Soren Kragh Jacobsen as well as new talents like Anders Thomas Jensen and Tomas Villum Jensen. Trust Film Sales' Rikke Ennis is in charge of OS.