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Source: The Match Factory

The Match Factory is to handle international sales for the new feature films by Barbara Albert and Christoph Hochhäusler, which are currently in production at locations in Germany.

Shooting began earlier this month in Bavaria on Albert’s screen adaptation of Julia Franck’s international bestseller Die Mittagsfrau which won the German Book Prize and has been translated into 37 languages.

The book, which first appeared in English in 2009 as The Blind Side Of The Heart ( US title: Blindness Of The Heart), reconstructs a mother’s biography spanning half a century up to the fateful day in 1945 when she abandons her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station to never return.

The production by Lucky Bird Pictures, Switzerland’s C-Films AG and Luxembourg’s Iris Productions S.A. is being co-produced by Wild Bunch’s German production arm Senator Film and public broadcasters ZDF and SRG.

Shooting will continue until the end of June at locations in Central Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg.

Wild Bunch Germany will release the film in German cinemas in 2023, with theatrical distribution in Switzerland being handled by Ascot Elite.

Meanwhile, Hochhäusler’s Sterben lernen (Learning To Die) will be the third of his feature films to be handled by The Match Factory following his 2010 Un Certain Regard title The City Below (Unter Dir die Stadt) and his last feature, the 2014 thriller The Lies Of The Victors (Die Lügen der Sieger).

The thriller, which centres on an undercover investigator’s unconventional tactics to win the confidence of a criminal he has under observation, also marks Hochhäusler’s fifth collaboration with Bettina Brokemper’s Cologne-based production outfit Heimatfilm, which began with his second feature Low Profile (Falscher Bekenner) that premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2005.

The 31-day shoot started at the beginning of May at locations in and around Frankfurt and will continue in North Rhine-Westphalia.