PRODUCTION Sweden
Leandersson and Hiort af Ornäs to catch Norlin's Tenderness
by Jorn Rossing Jensen
15/03/2012 - Swedish 16-year-old actress Lina Leandersson (pictured), who played the lead in Thomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In [trailer, film focus] (2008), will star with Sebastian Hiort af Ornäs in Swedish director Sofia Norlin's feature debut Tenderness, which starts principal photography this week (March 15) in Kiruna, Sweden's northernmost city. Leandersson just finished her work on Estonian director Kadri Kousaar's European Psycho; Hiort af Ornäs had his screen breakthrough in Swedish director Babak Najafi's Sebbe [trailer] (2010).
Tenderness is the first winner of the €500,000 scholarship for new women film-makers, launched last year by the Stockholm International Film Festival, including cash, services and a Nordic-Baltic distribution contract with Sweden's NonStop Entertainment, and backed by Telia communications, facility companies Dagsljus, Cinepost and the Swedish Film Institute (SFI).
The prize originally went to Lisa Aschan (She Monkeys [trailer]), who decided her project was probably not the most suitable for the concept. Instead it went to Norlin's depiction of young people taking the first steps towards building a new society, while the ground is literally shaking under their feet: Kiruna is situated on a mine, which is its pounding centre as well as a force that is threatening to tear it apart.
Produced by Olivier Guerpillon for DFM Fiktion, Tenderness will film on location until mid-June and will have its world premiere during this year's Stockholm festival (between November 7-18) before its release in spring 2013. A film student from Paris and Stockholm, Norlin has previously directed a 30-minute French-Swedish novella film, The Currents (2005), for France 2 and Sweden's SVT.
