Universal Pictures International (UPI) Germany is to handle distribution in all German-speaking territories for another three Egoli Tossell Film projects in addition to Michael Hoffman's $17m Tolstoy drama The Last Station, starring Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep.

The three new acquisitions by UPI are:

* Mostly Martha director Sandra Nettelbeck's next feature, the English-language hard-hitting drama Helen, which has Gillian Anderson attached and will be shot at locations in the US this autumn as a co-production with Doug Mankoff's Echo Lake Productions;

* A $13.4m adaptation of French novelist Francois Lelord's international bestseller Hector's Journey or The Search For Happiness, which has been developed with support from the private media fund GFP German Film Productions and the EU's MEDIA Programme;

* The $10.5m (Euros 8m) German-language biopic Hildegard Knef - The Gift Horse, based on the life of the late German diva and scripted by Fred Breinersdorfer (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days), with German actress Heike Makatsch to play Knef.

Meanwhile, today (Tuesday, March 13) sees Egoli Tossell Film wrapping production in Berlin on the German version of the award-winning BBC/HBO TV film The Girl In The Cafe. Starring Jan Josef Liefers and Julia Jentsch with a cameo appearance by Catherine Deneuve, Maria von Heland's version will be 'younger, sweeter and lighter' with the political side just as pronounced as in Richard Curtis's original, according to producer Judy Tossell.

Das Maedchen Aus Dem Cafe - the film's German title - will be broadcast by private TV station SAT.1 at the end of May, a week before the G8 summit in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm.

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