No more Trust in distribution
by Annika Pham
Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen’s international sales company Trust Film Sales is closing down its local distribution arm, Trust Distribution (TD), just five months after its founding (see article).
The move will see the loss of five of the company’s staff members, including CEO Maja Dyekjær Giese and theatrical manager Jimmy Bredow. Other employees made redundant are PR and marketing coordinators Alexandra Emilia Kida and Maia Schwartz, as well as Karina Hjort, traffic assistant.
The international sales arm, which often raises sizable sums of money for Zentropa productions, will continue to be run by sales executives Natja Rosner, Sofie Nyholm and Thomas Mai, who will soon be joined by Rikke Ennis, currently on maternity leave.
TD was set up last January with the goal of releasing five to six films a year, mostly Zentropa projects. The inaugural title was the specialised arthouse film How to Get Rid of Others [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Anders Rønnow Klarlund, which garnered 13,135 admissions from 15 screens.
However, the big disappointment for Zentropa and Trust was Lone Scherfig’s Just Like Home [+see also:
trailer
film profile], released last March. The comedy, which they were hoping would match the success of the director’s previous Danish blockbuster, Italian for Beginners (828,000 admissions in 2000), drew in only 62,065 filmgoers, triggering Jensen’s decision to withdraw fully from local distribution.
The liquidation of TD is yet another setback for Zentropa, which decided to set up its own distribution arm when a deal with another distributor, Filmfolket, fell through late last year, just as its distribution agreement with Nordisk was expiring.
Zentropa’s biggest local hits last year were Niels Arden Oplev’s We Shall Overcome [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (406,290 admissions) and Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Sisse Graum Jørgensen
interview: Susanne Bier
film profile] (391,444).
The next Zentropa productions scheduled for a summer release in Denmark are Anders Morgenthaler’s Echo [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Jakob Thuesen’s Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years.
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