Swedish director Ella Lemhagen, who had her international break with the award-winning Tsatsiki, Mum and the Policeman (1999), is readying her new project, Patrik 1,5, with $1m (Euros 800,000) production support from the Swedish Film Institute.

Scripted by Lemhagen from Swedish dramatist Michael Druker's play, Patrik 1,5 is the story of a gay couple adopting a child. The boy is not one-and-a-half-years old as promised, but 15 - and homophobic, with a criminal past.

Tomas Michaelsson will produce for FilmLance International, and Sonet Film will launch the film domestically next year.

Patrik 1,5 is one of seven features and two full-length documentaries, which the institute last week (June 29) decided to back by a total of $3.9m (Euros 2.8m), with the largest alllocation ($1.3m/Euros1m) for Svensk Filmindustri's $30.3m (Euros 22.8m) The Knight Templar 1+2, from Jan Guillou's bestselling trilogy, directed by Denmark's Peter Flinth.

The institute chipped in for two Swedish-Danish co-productions, $700,000 million (Euros 500,000) for Simon Staho's second Swedish feature, Heart of Heaven, from by Trollhattan Film (a subsidiary of Zentropa), and $200,000 (Euros 100,000) for Dogme director Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's What Nobody Knows, from Nimbus Film.

After their prize-winning documentaries, Prostitution Behind Veils and Gitmo, respectively, Nahid Persson and Erik Gandini were both subsidised for their next projects - Persson for Me and My Wives, following the Mohammadi family of husband and three wives, Gandini for Italy Is Nothing.

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