Transmission has come on board for Australia while Maywin has pre-bought Russian rights.

Mika Kaurismäki’s long gestating English-language period drama The Girl King (Kristina Of Sweden) is edging ever closer to production.

Two major new pre-sales have been closed on the $9.4m film (handled at the EFM by The Yellow Affair). Transmission has come on board for Australia while Maywin has pre-bought Russian rights.

Passing through Berlin this week, Kaurismäki said that he planned to start shooting the film later this year in Sweden and Germany. The art department is already at work. A top cinematographer is attached to the production.

Malin Buska is confirmed to star as the Seventeenth Century Queen, who reigned from the age of seven till she was 28.

Kaurismäki [pictured] is promising a very different vision of Kristina than that offered in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1933 feature Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo.

“I have seen the film of course but I try not to think about it,” Kaurismäki said of the Garbo movie. “We know that Greta Garbo was thinking of making a different kind of film but Hollywood was notr eady at that time to make a film as risky as that. We want to make the film she wanted to do.”

Earlier this week, it was confirmed that Kaurismäki’s Marianna Films was becoming a shareholder partner in The Yellow Affair.

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