EXCLUSIVE: German sales outfit boards Hagar Ben-Asher film set in the days following WWII.
The Match Factory is reuniting with Israeli filmmaker Hagar Ben-Asher for her third feature film The War Has Ended.
The Cologne-based company will handle world sales on the film while managing director Michael Weber will co-produce the film through his Pola Pandora Filmproduktion outfit in Berlin alongside Poland’s Madants and Israel’s Transfax Film Productions.
Pitching the €3.5m project at this week’s Polish Days in Wroclaw, Madants’ Beata Rzezniczek said the planned Polish majority production - which received development funding from the Polish-German Fund at the beginning of 2017 - is set to begin shooting at locations in Poland from late 2018.
Set in the days following the Second World War, The War Has Ended sees a marionette puppeteer rescuing a 13-year-old girl from verge of death and subsequently teaching her the art of puppeteering. Their lives become intertwined through circumstances and the belief that the war may never be over.
Ben-Asher, whose feature debut The Slut premiered in Cannes in 2011, described her latest project as “a reflection of the emotional and political state of today’s world.”
Main cast has yet to be set on the film but casting sessions were held in June in Warsaw, Gdynia, Wroclaw, Bialystok, and Bydgoszcz to find extras.
Arthouse stalwart The Match Factory also handles sales on the director’s previous film The Burglar which premiered at Rotterdam this year and is screening in the New Israeli Cinema showcase at Wroclaw’s New Horizons festival this week.
Pola Pandora will also co-produce Alice Rohrwachers’ Lazzaro Felice, which is currently in production with Sergi Lopez, Alba Rohrwacher and Nicoletta Braschi in the cast. The Match Factory is also handling sales on the Italian-language drama.
Producer Madants is serving as the Polish production partner on Claire Denis’ first English-language production High Life - which will also be partly shot in Poland - as well as Janis Nords’ Hearts and Fangs, Babis Makridis’ Pity and Haffstein Sigurdsson’s Under The Tree.
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