Switzerland's Rialto Film has been the first to pick up distribution rights to Dear Wendy, the highly-anticipated collaboration between Denmark's award-winning filmmakers, Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.

The two previously fathered the influential Dogme95 movement, and this time Vinterberg will direct the English-language film based on Trier's script. Wendy is set in a small mining village in the US and tells about a group of young outsiders, who form a pacifistic group, albeit with a dangerous infatuation with guns.

Trust Film Sales handles international sales and brought an early draft of the script to MIFED, but Trier and Vinterberg will rework the script together and dialogue and characters will be developed with the actors, who are yet to be cast.

The combination of the two filmmakers, who will be even more hot next year when their highly anticipated new films Dogville and It's All About Love are released, will make Dear Wendy a project impossible to ignore.

Production duties are handled by Sisse Graum Olsen, who previously produced Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself for Zentropa, but the $5.3m film will be produced under a new banner set up in collaboration between Peter Aalbaek Jensen and Lars von Trier's Zentropa and Birgitte Hald, Bo Ehrhardt and Thomas Vinterberg's Nimbus Film.

Dear Wendy shoots in Copenhagen in September 2003 with Anthony Dod Mantle (Festen, Dogville, It's All About Love) behind the High Definition 24P camera.