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FESTIVALS Sweden

Göteborg screens almost 500 films and one receives €117,000

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- Scandinavia's largest film festival, with an annual 130,000 admissions, announces the programme for this year's showcase

Sweden's Göteborg International Film Festival - Scandinavia's largest film showcase with an annual 130,000 admissions - will this year unspool almost 500 films at 23 venues between January 25-February 4, adding a market, seminars, talk shows, master classes, concerts and exhibitions.

At a press conference in Stockholm yesterday (January 8), artistic director Marit Kapla and festival chief Mikael Fellenius announced that the programme will be launched on January 25 by Norwegian directors Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning's action-adventure Kon-Tiki [+see also:
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 (photo), followed by excerpts from Swedish director - and honorary festival chairman - Roy Andersson's upcoming A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existance.

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Eight new Nordic features will compete for the SEK 1 million (€117,000) Dragon Award - one of the film world's largest prizes - including Norwegian directors Dag Johan Haugerud's I Belong, Sara Johnsen's All That Matters Is Past [+see also:
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, Hisham Zaman's Before Snowfall, Danish directors Michael Noer's Northwest, Tobias Lindholm's A Hijacking [+see also:
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interview: Tobias Lindholm
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, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur's The Deep [+see also:
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, Finnish director Aku Louhimies' 8-Ball and Swedish director Fredrik Edfeldt's Faro. [+see also:
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More Nordic: The Northern Lights section will zoom in on recent films from the Nordic countries, while Sweden itself  is covered by nine premieres, including three features, such as Johan Lind's festival closure, Den som söker, the total 2012 production of full-length films and 99 shorts.

US directors Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, Sascha Gervasi's Hitchcock, Dustin Hoffman's Quartet [+see also:
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, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, UK director Joe Wright's Anna Karenina [+see also:
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are among the selection for gala screenings in the international programme, which otherwise focuses on Chile, Iran, Austria, with sidebars on, among others, documentaries, animation, comedy, newcomers and festival favourites.

Two German directors and prominent members of 1970s' New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff and Margaretha von Trotta, are both on the 2012 guest list - Schlöndorff with his new film, Calm at Sea, von Trotta to receive the festival's Honorary Dragon Award and with two films on show, her latest Hanna Arendt and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975).

French director Olivier Assayas will present his new Something in the Air [+see also:
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interview: Olivier Assayas
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, while Saudi Arabia's first woman director Haifa Al Mansour will unspool Wadjda [+see also:
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in competition for the Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award (which comes with an invite for the Bergman Week, a DVD-box with 23 of his films and an engraved stone from his beach on Fårö).

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