Closer collaboration is being promoted by two German public film funds and opposite numbers in Norway and Denmark.

This week will see Hanover-based nordmedia and the East Norwegian fund Film3 joining forces with the Oldenburg International Film Festival (Sept 10-14) in Lower Saxony to stage the festival’s first ever co-production meeting entitled ‘Linking The North’ on Sept 13.

The event will bring producers from Northern Germany and Norway together to discuss the co-production potential of ten fiction feature and documentary projects.

The line-up of projects seeking partners includes:

  • Christian Lo’s 1910-set detective story The Charlatan, to be produced by Lillehammer-based Filmbin;

  • Peter Dodd and Kristian Kamp’s 3D family fantasy animation $17.5m film Troll: The Tale Of A Tail, which already has Norway’s Sagatoon, Canada’s Blue Bug Entertainment, and the UK’s Timeless Films already onboard as co-producers, looking for top financing and German distribution;

  • Leading Norwegian documentary production house AS Video Maker’s three-part series Seven Steps To Mercy;

  • Oldenburg-based Leonardo Film’s documentary Blowout! about oil exploration in the North Sea, to be produced and directed by Leonardo Film’s Elmar Bartlmae;

  • Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion’s four-part docudrama series The Emigrants, the story of emigration to North America from a pan-European perspective.

In recent years, nordmedia has been supporting collaboration between countries bordering the North Sea as part of a European Union Interreg project.

In addition, the fund has recently backed a number of co-productions between Germany and The Netherlands, and supported the first official co-production between Germany and Brazil, Karim Ainouz’s Praia do Futuro, which will be released by Real Fiction in German cinemas on October 2.

German-Danish initiative

The Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein (FFHSH) and the Danish Film Institute (DFI) have launched a German-Danish Coproduction Development Initiative.

Producers from Hamburg or Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark are being invited to submit projects to the new project development programme by the first deadline of March 16, 2015.

Up to three fiction feature films of high artistic quality with a theatrical release planned at least in Germany and Denmark will be supported with a maximum of $45,000 (€35,000) each.

The applications must be made jointly by a German producer from Hamburg or Schleswig-Holstein together with a Danish partner.

“Our desire is to financially support the creatives from Denmark and Germany right at an early stage and give them the time to develop the content of their projects together,” Eva Hubert, FFHSH’s CEO commented on the new venture.

FFHSH is already a partner with Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and the Istanbul Film Festival’s ‘Meetings on the Bridge’ on the German-Turkish Co-Production Development Fund which was launched in spring 2011.

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