Norwegian Film Institute backs new films from Bent Hamer, Erik Poppe

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Six features backed for $9.3m.

Women take the leads in the package of six new Norwegian features supported by $9.3m (NOK 53 million) from the Norwegian Film Institute: in five of them the main character is female, while Bård Breien’s The Downs Detective (Privatdetektiven) is the only man to strike back. The total production volume amounts to $24.5 million (NOK 140 million).

The Downs Detective, Breien’s first feature since The Art of Negative Thinking, is the story 28-year-old Robert who is a PI short of assignments: he suffers from Down Syndrome. But when the famous skater Olav Stjernen has disappeared, and the family needs a harmless detective, he gets his chance in this Asle Vatn production for Friland.

In veteran, multi-award-winning director Bent Hamer’s 1001 Grams (1001 gram), a female scientist – Marie – in her late 30s is sent to a seminar in Paris to discuss the future of the kilogram. During the stay she falls in love with a French colleague and puts her own life on the scales in Hamer’s seventh feature, which he has also written and will produce for his own BulBul Film.

His first film since Troubled Water concluded his Oslo trilogy, Erik Poppe’s A Thousand Times Good Night (aka Grenade) is inspired by his own experiences as a war photographer in the 1980s for the story of Rebekka, torn between the job she feels as a vocation and the family she loves so much. Gjerdrum and Kvae will produce for Paradox.

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Rune Denstad Langlo, whose feature debut North was awarded at the Berlinale and Tribeca among other festivals, will tell the story of a young woman, Anna, in Chasing the Wind (Jag etter vind). She has not seen her family for 10 years, but when her grandmother dies, she goes back for an unexpected homecoming. Sigve Endresen and Brede Hovland will produce for Motlys.

Teresa has always had a good relationship to her twin brother, Frode, until they inherit their parents’ house – she wants to keep it, he wants to sell. Geir Henning Hopland depicts the showdown in his feature debut Teresa and Her Eight-Minute-Older Brother (Teresa & hennes 8 minutter elder bror), which Finn Gjerdrum, Stein B Kvae and Ruben Thorkildsen will produce for Paradox.

Another first feature is Eskild Vogt’s Blind, bringing together a 30-year-old woman who has recently lost her sight, a 30-year-old newly-divorced single mother, and a 40-year-old man, a loner who is into porn on the web. Vogt, a co-writer of Joachim Trier (Oslo, August 31^st/2011), will make the film with Motlys’ Endresen and Hans-Jørgen Osnes.

The Norwegian Film Institute also backed four Norwegian minority projects instigated by international production houses, including Dutch director Danyael Sugawar’s North Bay (Nordfjord), Finnish director Taru Mäkelä’s August Fools (Mieletön elokuu), Swedish directors Mikael Marcimain’s Gentlemen and Kjell-Åke Andersson’s Nobody Owns Me (Mig äger ingen).