Beta takes on four new films including Huntgeburth’s Tom Sawyer

By Geoffrey Macnab2011-05-11T05:30:00+01:00

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On the eve of this year’s Cannes Festival, German sales outfit Beta Cinema has snapped up international sales rights to four new projects.

The films Beta will be presenting to buyers are all in post-production.

Among them is a brand new version of the much filmed Mark Twain classic, Tom Sawyer. This will be directed by Hermine Huntgeburth (The White Masai). The cast is led by Louis Hofmann, Leon Seidel, Heike Makatsch and Benno Fürmann.

The movie is set for a November 2011 release in Germany through Majestic and is being produced by Neue Schönhauser Filmproduktion GmbH in co-production with Majestic Filmproduktion and HI Film Production.

Meanwhile, Beta has also picked up Hell, the debut feature by Tim Fehlbaum. Executive produced by Roland Emmerich, this is a dystopian sci-fi yarn set in a near future where violent solar storms have dried up the Earth, which is prey to an unbearable heat. The film, set for release in Germany in the autumn through Paramount, stars Hannah Herzsprung, Stipe Erceg, Lars Eidinger Angela Winkler and Lisa Vicari.

Another Beta acquisition is love story Westwind by Robert Thalheim, about the romantic complications in the lives of two 17-year-old twins from East Germany. In 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down, they spend the summer at Lake Balaton in the Soviet satellite state of Hungary. En route, they meet some young men from the West German city of Hamburg. It stars Friederike Becht, Luise Heyer, Volker Bruch, Franz Dinda and Hans Uwe Bauer.

Also new on the Beta slate is Shores Of Hope, the debut feature by student Academy Award winning Toke Constantin Hebbeln. It’s the story of two East-German dock workers, Cornelis Schmidt (Alexander Fehling) and Andreas Hornung (August Diehl), who, in the 1980s, dream an impossible dream: of sailing out to sea.

Shores is produced by UFA Cinema and FrisbeeFilms in co-production with BR, Degeto, SWR, BR/arte, arte and SR alongside Hahn Film and in cooperation with CinePostproduction.

Here in Cannes, Beta is presenting the new Til Schweiger film Kokowääh (already a German box office hit). Among its other titles is new Agnieszka Holland drama In Darkness, which is still in post-production. The film, based on the true story “In the Sewers of lvov” by Robert Marshall, has already been pres-sold to Sony in the US.