Worst Person on set

Source: Oslo Pictures/Christian Belgaux

Joachim Trier (right) and Renate Reinsve (centre) on the set of ‘The Worst Person In The World’

Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s father-daughter drama Sentimental Value has received €200,000 from the German Federal Film Board (FFA) and will shoot in Germany as well as in Norway and France later this year.

The film will reunite Trier with Renate Reinsve, the star of his Oscar-nominated The Worst Person In The World, and that film’s writer Eskil Vogt.

The production funding was allocated to the film’s German co-producer Komplizen Film which is producing with Norway’s Mer Film and Eye Eye Pictures, Denmark’s Zentropa, France’s Agat Films, and MK Production.

The family drama is about two sisters forced to deal with their estranged father following the death of their mother.

Further FFA support of €500,000 has been awarded to leading German director Wolfgang Becker’s The Hero Of Friedrichstrasse Station, set to star Daniel Brühl and Leonie Benesch, the star of the Oscar-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge.

It is Becker’s first film since 2015’s Me And Kaminski. He will co-direct with Achim von Borries who co-directed all four seasons of Babylon Berlin with Tom Tykwer and Henk Handloegten.

X Filme Creative Pool is producing the film written by Constantin Lieb which is based on Maxim Leo’s bestselling German novel about a journalist investigating mass escape from East Germany in the 1980s and a misunderstanding that hides the truth.

The Hero of Friedrichstrasse Station will mark Becker’s third collaboration with Brühl after 2003’s Good Bye, Lenin! and Me And Kaminski. Charly Hübner will co-star.

Among other projects to receive support from the FFA in this latest funding session were a screen adaptation of the Michael Ende children’s classic Momo (€801,000), to be directed by Christian Ditter for Munich-based Rat Pack Filmproduktion; another collaboration between The Teachers’ Lounge producer if…Productions and veteran director Edgar Reitz on his long gestating project Leibniz (€300,000) about the 18th-century German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; and Ulrike Tony Vahl’s debut feature The Crux (€300,000) , a historical drama set in the last days of the Second World War, to be produced by CALA Filmproduktion with Poland’s Extreme Emotions.