James Foley thriller in Bavaria Film Partners slate, Dakota Fanning attached

US director James Foley’s coming of age thriller Furious Angel is one of the first projects being lined up for production this year by the new Munich-based co-production/co-financing entity Bavaria Film Partners (BFP).

Speaking exclusively to Screen Daily, managing director Markus Vogelbacher said that BFP has attracted a private investor for the €10m project which is set to shoot in Germany from the end of 2011, as a co-production with Arena Multimedia, Light Brigade Entertainment and Menz & Friends.

Adam Krentzman, Lowell Blank and Vogelbacher will serve as producers on the action thriller written by Thane Swigart. Munich-based world sales company Atlas Film International will handle international distribution.

Vogelbacher revealed that Dakota Fanning is already attached to play the heroine Lilly, a 17-year-old student at a Catholic boarding school who has been trained from an early age by her adopted crime boss father to be a hit man - that is, until she decides that she wants to get out of the family business and live a normal life.

The story is set completely in Germany and all of the shoot and the complete postproduction will be done here, Vogelbacher explained.

Meanwhile, this August will see principal photography beginning on BFP’s first project, the €4m family entertainment film Schatzritter, which is being structured as a Luxembourg-German co-production between Bernard Michaux’s Lucil Film, Munich-based NEOS Film and Screenvest.

The feature debut by Luxembourg-born Laura Schroeder will feature Alexandra Neldel, Luc Feit and Clemens Schick in the German-language production about a children’s gang of treasure hunters fighting to save a castle from the dark Duc de Berry.

Bavaria Film Partners was set up this February specifically to attract international service-driven co-productions to Germany and for the to make use of Bavaria Film Studios’ extensive infrastructure of sound stages and postproduction facilities outside of Munich.

In addition, BFP plans to offer co-financing possibilities for commercially attractive projects through its partnership with a number of institutional and private investors and can invest up to €5m equity per project.