Projects backed in $15m funding round include Joe Wright’s thriller Hanna, now shooting at Babelsburg Studios.

New films by Emir Kusturica, Joe Wright, Katja von Garnier and Bille August are among the projects backed with a total of nearly $15m (€11m) by the German Federal Film Board (FFA), MDM Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and FilmFörderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein at their latest funding sessions.

Kusturica’s Cool Water, which will be produced by Hamburg-based Brave New Work Filmproduktion with France’s Wild Bunch and Israel’s Transfax Films, received $1m (€750,000) from Hamburg and $336,000 (€250,000) from the FFA. The fast-paced comedy by Hamburg-based writer Gabriel Bornstein about two Palestinian brothers wanting to take the body of their late father to Ramallah, will be begin shooting in Hamburg and Palestine from this summer.

Meanwhile, Joe Wright’s thriller Hanna, starring Cate Blanchett, Saoirse Ronan and Eric Bana, which began production at the Babelsberg Studios this month, received $270,000 (€200,000) from Hamburg because part of the shooting will also be based in the North German city.

A total of $1.2m (€900,000) was allocated by the FFA and MDM to Katja von Garnier’s Hector’s Journey, adapted by Maria von Heland from Francois Lelord’s bestselling novel, which will begin shooting this summer at locations in Saxony-Anhalt, China, France, and South Africa. The international co-production between Egoli Tossell Film (ETF), Bac Films and Film Afrika will be the first time ETF has Warner Bros. Entertainment Germany onboard one of its projects as a production partner.

Moreover, Malte Grunert’s Amusementpark Films – the co-producer last year of David Mackenzie’s The Last Word – received $94,000 (€70,000) development support for Bille August’s Heaven On Earth (Himmel auf Erden), based on a screenplay by Lone Scherfig about a summer love affair which begins in 1965 between a Danish musician and a girl from East Germany.

German funding was also forthcoming for French filmmaker Stephane Robelin’s feature debut To The Moon And Back Around The World which will be co-produced by Berlin-based Rommel Film and reportedly has Jane Fonda, Geraldine Chaplin, Pierre Richard and Daniel Brühl lined up for the cast; Peter Dalle’s historical political thriller Waves From Home about how tensions appear in an international polar expedition after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939; Radoslav Spassov’s biopic of the legendary Bulgarian folk and jazz singer Lea Ivanova The Girl from Slaveikov Square, which will be the first fiction feature film from Leipzig-based LE Vision in co-production with Sofia’s Menclips Ltd and Sweden’s Illusion Film; and Alexander Mindadze’s drama That Saturday (Unschuldiger Samstag), set against the Chernobyl tragedy of 1986, which will be produced by Russia’s Passenger with Bavaria Pictures.

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