20/12/2011

Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland (picture), who most recently made the award-winning portrait of A Somewhat Gentle Man [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hans Petter Moland
film profile] (2010), has made an appointment with The Prize Idiot for his next - and eighth - feature. Packaged by Norwegian producers Finn Gjerdrum and Stein B. Kvae for Paradox Spillefilm, with Denmark's Zentropa Entertainments and Zentropa Sweden/Trollhättan Film, the film has received €450,000 support from the European co-production fund, Eurimages.

"A veteran director, an intelligent and well-written script, a brilliant cast and a smart way of mixing different genres," said the Eurimages committee of the project, penned by Moland and Danish writer Kim Fupz Aakeson. The Prize Idiot is the story of Niels, a family father and snowplough entrepreneur, who provokes a showdown between the Albanian mafia and established drug dealers in eastern Norway. Launched at the Berlinale, A Somewhat Gentle Man won the festival's Audience Prize.

Eurimages also shelled out €175,000 for Finnish director Taru Mäkalä's romantic comedy, August Fools, which will be produced by Mäkelä and Markku Flink for Finland's Kinosto with Norway's Pomor Film (Knut Skoglund). Aki Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen will play the lead as Elsa, a middle-aged milliner and part-time clairvoyant in total control of her life, until the man she once loved and lost (and believed to be dead) walks in through the door of her little hat shop in Helsinki.

Raija Talvio's original screenplay is set on the political backdrop of Europe's Cold-War era, and "the film will sparkle with love and happiness and plenty of good music from the early 1960s," said Mäkelä of his "happy, sometimes even crazy film with a bitter-sweet touch of warm human undertanding - my contribution to the genre I love." One of Finland's oldest film companies, previously controlling the country's largest cinema circuit, Kinosto is today owned by Mäkela and his DoP Jouko Seppälä.