01/07/2013 - The Danish Film Institute declines to support Danish director Ole Bornedal’s feature spin-off from his €23 million TV series, both from quality and audience potential

Following the refusal by the Danish Film Institute to support Danish director Ole Bornedal’s historical epic 1864, the feature spin-off from his €23 million TV series, the film will be made as a Norwegian movie. With Norway’s Cinenord Spillefilm as co-producer, 1864 has received €260,000 production funding from the Norwegian Film Institute, and thus qualifies as being ‘Norwegian’.

Danish producers Peter Bose and Jonas Allen, of Miso film, and Bornedal (photo) plan to launch the feature, if possible in competition, at the Berlin International Film Festival 2015, and the production’s Danish publicist Freddy Neumann confirmed that it will be presented under the Norwegian label.

Miso Film first applied for production funding according to the film institute’s market programme, which subsidises films with a broad audience appeal, but it was refused because the viewers’ potential was considered limited, since 1864 would already have been aired by Danish pubcaster DR. The second petition was rejected by a film commissioner, Steen Bille, who valued its “artistic merit” but did not like the script.

Last month the most expensive Danish television series so far, with a cast of 160 actors and 6,000 extras, filmed one of its key scenes - the battle of Dybbøl, during the Danish-German war in 1864 – in Prague during a 43C heat wave. In the real battle of Dybbøl, which took place in early spring, 3,600 Danish soldiers were killed; in the 2013 version, 18 extras playing German soldiers were taken to hospital with heat stroke.

Starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Pilou Asbæk, Søren Malling and Sofie Graabøl, with Nicolas Bro, Bent Mejding, Lars Mikkelsen, Søren Pilmark, Zlatko Buric and Norway’s Jakob Oftebro (Kon-Tiki [+see also:
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