Hungarian production house Inforg Studio is to co-produce Polish filmmaker Maciej Adamek's feature debut The Photograph and Benedek Fliegauf's next project Womb, which will be his first feature to be shot in the English language.

Inforg's Andras Muhi confirmed to ScreenDaily.com at this week's goEast Film Festival that he will be a partner along with Germany's Busse & Halberschmidt in Koncept Media's production of Adamek's project which had been presented by producer Radek Stys at the 2006 CentEast market and last year's Connecting Cottbus co-production market and the P.R.I.M.E. packaging programme.

The drama, about a 16-year-old who finds a photograph of his pregnant mother and a stranger, is also backed by the Polish Film Institute, broadcaster TVP and the Filmstiftung NRW. Shooting is planned for this summer and W-Film will distribute theatrically in Germany.

At the same time, Muhi is planning his fourth feature film collaboration with Benedek Fliegauf - after Forest, Dealer, and Milky Way - with the science fiction drama Womb which has France's A.S.A.P. Films and the UK's Film4 onboard as co-producers and Berlin-based Razor Film as delegate producer.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily.com at goEast in Wiesbaden, Fliegauf explained the reasons for making this first foray into shooting in English. 'It is a very universal story, a love story, so that is why I want to shoot it in English because that is the common language for everyone today. If I had set the film in the Middle Ages, I would have had to have people speaking Latin.'

Meanwhile, Fliegauf revealed that a casting director will soon begin casting UK actors for the film as he wants 'to use native English actors because in my view I don't like these Europuddings where you have all different kinds of acccents.'

The film will be shot this autumn in the Hamburg area and North Sea coast with studio interiors in Berlin. As Fliegauf notes, 'one will know the setting is somewhere in Europe, but we don't know exactly where. The first sentence in the screenplay of the movie will be: 'We are somewhere in North Europe in the near future'.'

He added that he would be bringing his Hungarian DoP - Peter Szatmari - from Dealer 'because I need somebody I know very well and can trust, and where we can talk in my mother tongue.' But, otherwise, the crew members will be drawn from the co-producing countries.

Womb has received backing from Filmfoerderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the MEDIA Programme, the Motion Picture Public Foundation of Hungary and ScriptEast, and will be presented by Fliegauf as one of 15 projects at the Cinefondation's L'Atelier in Cannes next month.

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