Country Focus: Sweden
SFI publishes 2009 annual report
by Annika Pham
10/06/2010 - The Swedish Film Institute’s (SFI) Facts and Figures 2009 – providing in-depth information about last year’s film year in Sweden (including on admissions, production, distribution and festival news) – is now online.
As SFI CEO Cissi Elwin Frenkel stressed in the report introduction, 2009 was “a unique and exceptional year” for Swedish cinema, with one in three tickets sold for a Swedish film, thanks largely to the Millennium trilogy. For Elwin Frenkel, the SFI succeeded in raising the quality of Swedish films, which led to a high number of admissions and festival awards for films such as The Girl [trailer, film focus], Burrowing [trailer] and The Ape [trailer].
However, the head of the SFI also sounded a reminder that the Swedish film sector still remains highly underfinanced and is in urgent need of an extra SEK100 million (nearly €10.4m) cash injection from the State. This extra money would go towards raising the SFI’s share in financing a film from 22% in 2005 and 36% in 2009 to around 40%. Around SEK15 million (€1.55m) of the SEK100 million would be earmarked for documentaries.
In terms of theatrical releases, 42 Swedish features were distributed in 2009, of which 14 were by first-time directors. Admissions for Swedish films reached 5.69 million, for a 32.7% market share. US films had a market share of 53.9%, the UK 7.3%, Australia 2.2%, France 1.4% and Italy 0.5%.
The five most successful (non-Swedish) European films were Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince [trailer] (over 754,000 admissions for Warner Bros.), Slumdog Millionaire [trailer, film focus] (197,401 admissions – SF Film), Brüno (188,436 - Nordisk Film), Coco Before Chanel [trailer] (63,059 - SF Film) and Gomorrah [trailer, film focus] (58,971 - NonStop Entertainment).
The distributor with the largest market share was Nordisk Film (26.2%), followed by 20th Century Fox (13.3%), UIP (12%), SF Film (10.1%), Sony Pictures Releasing (9.7%) and Walt Disney (9.4%).
