Danish producer and Zentropa co-founder Peter Aalbæk Jensen is plotting a new English-language feature based on a novel by revered Out Of Africa author Karen Blixen.

The Angelic Avengers, published in 1946 under the pen name Isak Dinesen, is billed as “a Gothic romance”.

The film will be directed by Birger Larsen, who directed several episodes of Scandinavian TV noir The Killing as well as British TV movie Murder: Joint Enterprise.

The Angelic Avengers is the story of two young women abandoned and trying to cope with poverty and grief in 19th century Britain and France. An elderly Scottish cleric and his wife invite the girls to live on their estate in France, apparently kindly intentions.. But the girls discover that, under cover of piety and idealism, the clergyman and his wife lure young girls into their grasp into to sell them into the white slave trade. 

Jensen is looking for British partners for the project, which is likely to have a budget of around €6m.

TrustNordisk will be handling sales.

Jensen suggests the film visually and thematically will be in similar vein to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Aalbæk Jensen will be in Cannes this week looking to pursue financing on ambitious Viking movie The Long Ships, scripted by Tobias Lindholm and to be directed by Hans Petter Moland. Lindholm’s script is now completed. 

The veteran producer is also involved in Lars Von Trier’s forthcoming high end TV series The House That Jack Built.

“He (Von Trier) is very enthusiastic,” Jensen stated of the TV project, which Von Trier is currently writing. “It will be funny and scary and very witty - and, of course, like always also with spectacular images. It is a story about a serial killer.”

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