Author Erland Loe to co-direct Inventory

Loe will share directing duties on the black comedy with producer Yngve Sæther. The film, currently in development, will mark the directorial debut for both.

It will be produced by by Hans-Jørgen Osnes and Sæther for Oslo’s Motlys.

Loe has also adapted his screenplay for a novel, which Norway’s Cappelen Damm published in April, and also has been sold to Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Slovakia and Serbia, according to the Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

Loe and Sæther have known each other since the early 1990s, when Sæther used Loe as an actor in a short film.

Sæther  said: “He is a great storyteller, and we felt we could pull this project together. Few films deal with aging people who often feel rejected by society once they have passed their ‘use-by-date’.”

 Sæther is an in-house producer at Motlys, where he has three times been nominated for Norway’s national film prize, the Amanda, and won for Stian Kristiansen’s The Man Who Loved Yngve (2008).

Norwegian actress Anne Marit Jacobsen, who has featured in 40 Norwegian films - most recently Dag Johan Haugerud’s I Belong (2012) - will star in Inventory as a 66-year-old poet on the day she issues her last collection of poems.

In the morning her publisher calls to inform her that the reviews are bad and the bookstore, where she is supposed to take part in a reading, cancels due to an inventory problem. She sets out in the city and realises she is doing her own inventory over her life and contemporary society.

Loe has either scripted or adapted his own novels for six features, most recently An Ordinary Day at Work (2010).

 Sæther, who has seven features and television series to his producer credits, including I Belong, will shortly premiere Stian Kristiansen’s Kiss Me, You Fucking Moron on August 9. This film is about a group of teenagers staging a play under the direction of a professional actor in the midst of a crisis, with Kristoffer Joner and Eli Harboe in the leads.