New feature films by Michael Glawogger, Benjamin Heisenberg, Simon Aeby and Goetz Spielmann are among a raft of projects backed with over $3.15m (Euros 2.4m) by the Austrian Film Institute (OFI).

However, due to the funding body's current budgetary situation there was only around $1.3m (Euros 1m) available at this session for selective production funding, which was decided by a committee including German producer Jakob Claussen, sales agent Michael Weber and OFI managing director Roland Teichmann.

The largest amount of selective funding - $756.4m (Euros 577,000) - was awarded to Goetz Spielmann's Revanche which is described as 'a story about guilt and revenge' and will be produced by Spielmann Film with Prisma Film. Another project supported in this funding category was Emmy-winner Nick Stringer's The Turtle's Song which will be produced by the UK's F&ME and Big Wave Productions with Vienna-based Allegro Film and Finland's Matila Rohr Productions. The $3m semi-documentary follows the odyssey of a giant loggerhead turtle around the world and is being handled internationally by Sola Media who made presales for the film to Eastern Europe and Switzerland in Berlin last month.

Meanwhile, automatic 'reference' development support was paid out by OFI for such new projects as Simon Aeby's thriller Asylum and Benjamin Heisenberg's Der Raeuber, which is based on Martin Prinz's novel about a bank robber from the late 1980s who earned the name 'Pumpgun Ronnie' for wearing a Ronald Reagan mask during his bank raids.

Automatic production support was awarded to Thomas Roth's rockstar biopic Falco,

which is being planned as a co-production by MR Film with Germany's Constantin Film, and Michael Glawogger's comedy Contact High, which will be produced by Lotus Film with Berlin-based Boje Buck Filmproduktion. Described as 'a comedy of mistaken identity and a road movie', Contact High will reunite Glawogger with Michael Ostrowski, the co-author of his previous feature Nacktschnecken, and have the actors from that film such as Ostrowski, Pia Herzegger, Georg Friedrich and Detlev Buck reprising their roles.

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