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MARKETS The Netherlands

After Scandinavia, Holland Film Meeting to focus on Turkey

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With Scandinavia as the focal point of this year’s session, the Holland Film Meeting; the industry-oriented side of the Netherlands International Film Festival in Utrecht which ends today (September 30), will next year collaborate with the Meetings on the Bridge confab in Istanbul to present Turkey as the annual theme.

”For the first time we liaised with a local co-production market – New Nordic Films at the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund – where four Dutch film projects were presented at Nordic Co-Production and Film Financing Forum,” explained Signe Leick Jensen, heading the programme for the first time. ”At least two of them found Norwegian partners.”

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”In exchange we included Nordic films-in-progress in the international section of the Netherlands Production Platform, and it is my impression that the Nordic producers found the round-tables and one-to-one meetings very useful. Also the opportunity for the industry in the two regions to get to know each other and their different systems of funding.”

”Very useful indeed,” confirmed Norwegian veteran producer John M Jacobsen (Filmkameratene), who was launching the €8.4 million World War II drama, Norwegian director Vibeke Idsøe’s Theresienstadt Requiem, set in the Nazi ghetto north of Prague. ”Utrecht was certainly worth the visit, and not only regarding the film we are currently packaging.”

”We already had a Dutch co-producer for our film – Submarino – but after our meetings in Utrecht we sorted out which Finnish and Australian partners to attach,” explained Danish producer Peter Engel, of Zentropa RamBUk, who represented Danish director Stefan Fjeldmark’s €2.2 million Our House, in pre-production from early next year.

Staged by The Netherlands’ IDTV and Family Affair, Polish-born director Urszula Antoniak’s entry in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, Code Blue [+see also:
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, was the case study at the Holland Film Meeting – it was co-produced by Denmark’s Zentropa Entertainments and one of the relatively few collaboration projects of the Dutch and the Scandinavian film industries.

”Why that is? Well, the co-production budgets for the Nordic film institutes are limited, and most of them are presumably spent on films from other Nordic countries,” said managing director Hanne Palmquist, of the largest Scandinavian film fund, Oslo-based Nordisk Film & TV Fond. ”Judging from what I have heard here, there could easily be more joint ventures with the Dutch.

”One of the reasons for the Norwegian absence is that there has only been little networking between Norwegian and Dutch producers,” added head of production Ivar Køhn, of the Norwegian Film Institute. ”In Utrecht it appeared that there many are similarities between the regions, and that both industries could benefit from increasing their collaboration.”

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