02/03/2012 - UK director-producer drops threat of court injunction against Norwegian director Peter Næss’s latest feature, which will close Filmfest Oslo

Norwegian Peter Næss’s €2 million World War II epic, Into the White [+see also:
trailer
film profile], will close the new Filmfest Oslo on March 4 and go into a 100-screen general release on March 9 as planned, following UK director-producer Alexander Joyce decided to drop his threat of a court injunction to stop the launch because of copyright infringement.

Since 2004, Joyce had been working on a documentary, Comrade, depicting when German Luftwaffe pilot Horst Schopis’s bomber was shot down over Grotli in Norway by an RAF fighter, which subsequently crashlanded in the fjells. Three German and two English crew members found shelter from the strong Norwegian winter in the same isolated cottage.

He approached Zentropa Entertainments with the project in 2009, but instead of co-financing the documentary and staging the feature the company simply took over the project, without making any financial arrangement with him, he claimed. Joyce told local press that although he was sure he would win a the case if it came to court, he was not guaranteed to be paid damages.

So after the film has changed titles, and Zentropa has returned an interview taped by Joyce with the German pilot (who died last year), Næss, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen and their internatiopnal cast of Florian Lukas, David Kross, Rupert Grint, Lachlan Nieboer and Stig Henrik Hoff will be ready for the world premiere Wednesday at Oslo’s Folketeateret.

”It will be an honour to show the film at this venerable theatre – and like coming home: my parents met there in the late 1950s, he was a stage designer, she was an actress, so I was probably conceived in the paint room or the wings,” explained Næss, who scripted with Ole Melgaard and Dave Mango. – Denmark’s TrustNordisk has so far sold 22 territories.