Having pumped more than $4.6bn into a variety of Hollywood slate deals in the past two years, German bank Dresdner Kleinwort is now looking at Europe to see whether a similar co-financing structure could enable a portfolio of European films from different production sources.

The bank's New York-based media and entertainment chief Laura Fazio told Screen International's European Film Finance Summit yesterday that Dresdner is in the embryonic stages of preparing a $100-$130m 'fund of funds' within the next year.

Acknowledging that few European production entities can produce a studio-sized annual slate of pictures, Fazio envisages pooling together between 18-25 film projects from a geographically diverse range of mid-sized production companies.

'There is a need to combine projects to create scale,' she said. She acknowledged the difficulties of working with so many different financing cultures and state support mechanisms, but is confident that this approach can be made to work in Europe too.

'There are material differences which means you could not simply replicate the US model but we can build a better mousetrap.'

One of the big challenges will be to provide the level of statistical data on film revenues from European films that hedge funds and institutional investors demand from their Hollywood clients in their quest of 15%-25% returns.

'The investors we are talking about are data driven. They don't want scripts but they want to understand all aspects of the risks involved. Business strategies need to be prepared with institutional investment in mind.'

But it is a project she accepts will be a major challenge. The wide range of companies and wide variation in public funding is much more difficult to pull together than working with one studio.

Those contributing to the fund of funds slate may watch their successful film offset by the flop from a rival and that may cause tensions, she acknowledged.

But Fazio said the idea was about taking advantage of a financial trend that had proven itself in the US through what she called a 'perfect storm' that had fundamentally changed the investment market.

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