02/10/2012 - Zentropa Entertainments and commercial broadcaster TV2 start production of the first four films from Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen's thriller series about Department Q

While Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen is working on his fifth novel in the Department Q series (for "cases of special focus"), Denmark's Zentropa Entertainments and Danish commercial broadcaster TV2 will this week (October 5) start principal photography on The Woman in the Cage, number one of the first four thrillers, which will be premiered at Christmas 2013.

Danish actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas (photo), who earlier this year won the Danish film critics' Bodil award for the lead in Martin P Zandvliet's A Funny Man [+see also:
trailer
film profile], will star as deputy detective superintendent Carl Mørck – head of Department Q - with Søren Pilmark as his superior, chief of homicide, and Sonja Richter as the first victim in the franchise.

Richter plays a Danish politician who disappeared five years earlier, presumed dead, but who was in fact abducted and has since been incarcerated in an isolated pressure chamber. Danish director Mikkel Nørgaard, who made Clown [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2010) which took 855,174 domestic admissions, will direct.

Besides The Woman in the Cage (aka Mercy (2007)), the first package includes The Pheasant Killers (2008), Message in a Bottle (2009) and Journal 64 (2010), which have all been scripted by Nikolaj Arcel<> (A Royal Affair [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mikkel Boe Følsgaard
interview: Nikolaj Arcel
film profile]) and will be produced by Louise Vest (A Royal Affair, Lars von Trier's Melancholia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lars von Trier
film profile]).

The four Adler-Olsen thrillers, which will be produced both for theatrical and television on a €20 million budget, have sold six million copies in 32 countries – 1.3 million in Denmark alone – and the author will publish No 5 next summer. Zentropa chief Peter Aalbæk Jensen is ready to prolong the series by an annual addition "at least for the next ten years".