Latest funding round backs 20 projects backed with over $7.4m (€ 5.8m).

New feature films by David Cronenberg, Joe Wright, Dennis Gansel and Katja von Garnier are among 20 projects backed with over $7.4m (€ 5.8m) production support by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (MBB) in its latest round of funding.

The largest single amount - $1.5m (€ 1.15m) – went to UFA Cinema’s production of Gansel’s political thriller Im Jahr Des Hundes, starring Moritz Bleibtreu as a celebrity journalist in Russia who becomes trapped between rival political interests.

The fund awarded $1.1m (€ 900,000) to Wright’s action thriller Hanna, produced by Focus Features with Sechzehnte Babelsberg Film, which is now moving from its Babelsberg base for location shooting in Morocco, and $318,000 (€ 250,000) to Cronenberg’s adaptation of Christopher Hampton’s The Talking Cure, entitled A Dangerous Method and starring Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, set to begin shooting at MMC Studios in Cologne from mid-May.

Other international co-productions supported by MBB included Katja von Garnier’s Hector’s Journey, produced by Egoli Tossell Film with Bac Films, Film Afrika and Warner Bros. Entertainment Germany;  Romanian-born Reka Kincses’ feature debut the tragicomedy Homeland, produced by Nikovantastic Film with Hungary’s Inforg Studio; Chinese-born Dan Tang’s comedy I Phone You, produced by Reverse Angle Pictures with Wang Yu’s Beijing-based Ray Productions; and X-Filme Creative Pool’s German-Russian co-production 4 Tage Im Mai by Achim von Borries, set in the final days of the Second World War.

In addition, MBB allocated support for the theatrical releases of such films as the Berlinale competition film The Hunter, UFA Cinema’s Enid Blyton adaptation Hanni und Nanni, and David Sieveking’s documentary on Transcendental Meditation, David Wants To Fly, which opened in 25 German cinemas today.

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