Florian Gaertner's screwball teenage comedy Sex Up will be the sixth local feature to be produced by Deutsche Columbia Pictures Filmproduktion GmbH (DCPF), the German production arm of Columbia TriStar Film.

DCPF's production partner on the project, which is being scripted by Gaertner with Jakob Hilpert (Kleine Kreise), will be Berlin-based outfit Schramm Film whose production of Christian Petzold's The State I Am In (Die Innere Sicherheit) won the "Best Film" Lola at last year's German Film Awards.

Meanwhile, principal photography began on March 4 in Berlin on DCPF's fifth project - Anatomie 2 - the sequel to the company's first outing into production which attracted more than 2m cinemagoers in Germany in 2000.

Anatomie 2 will reunite DCPF with Austrian writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky and production partner Claussen + Woebke Filmproduktion who were part of the successful team on the first film.

Backing has come from Filmboard Berlin-Brandenburg, FilmFernsehFonds Bayern and the Federal German Film Board (FFA), and it is expected that the German arm of Columbia TriStar will release the film at the end of the year.

DCPF has around a dozen other projects at various stages of development, including the thriller Ego, to be directed by Hendrik Hendloegten (Paul Is Dead) from a screenplay by Hendloegten and Achim von Boerries (England!) and produced with X-Filme Creative Pool; the psychological thriller Whisper In The Attic, to be directed by Peter Keglevic with Norbert Preuss' Fanes Film (Das Experiment); Viivian Naefe's romantic comedy Big Switch (working title), penned by US-born screenwriter Ben Taylor and to be produced with SAM Film; Der Verlorene, an adaptation by Ruth Toma of Hans-Ulrich Treichel's novel; and Maria von Heland's family entertainment film Triple Magic, written by Susanne Freund.

So far, three of DCPF's produced films have been released theatrically Ruzowitzky's Anatomie, Lars Kraume's Viktor Vogel - Commercial Man (which was seen by 155,168 cinemagoers last year) and Gregor Schnitzler's Was Tun Wenn's Brennt, which has attracted over 330,000 admissions since its opening at the end of this January. A fourth project - Maria von Heland's teenage melodrama Big Girls Don't Cry (Grosse Maedchen Weinen Nicht), produced with Egoli Tossell Film, is still in postproduction and will be released this summer.

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