Danish producer Meta Louise Foldager (photo), who most recently made Danish director Nikolaj Arcel's Oscar-nominated A Royal Affair [+see also:
film review
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interview: Mikkel Boe Følsgaard
interview: Nikolaj Arcel
film profile], has opened a Swedish production shingle, Meta Film Stockholm, which will initially stage a television series on gang-related crime in Sweden and Denmark scripted by Swedish writer Peter Birro.

 

Birro, who has just written the biopic on Swedish singer-actress Monica Zetterlund, Monica Z - A Lingonberry in a Cocktail, which Danish director Per Fly has just finished - and whose depiction of the 1960s' whirlwind romance of Swedish legendary singer Anita Lindblom and hard-hitting boxer Bosse Högberg is yet to start - is already attached to Meta Film penning the sequel to Pelle the Conqueror, Danish director Bille August's 1989 Oscar winner.

 

Based on volumes 2-4 of Danish socialist writer Martin Andersen Nexø's novels, following Pelle after he has come to Copenhagen from Bornholm in the early 1900s, describing the Danish labour movement, Pelle II - directed by award-winning Fly - is in pre-production for Foldager with Kenneth Plummer, former chief of Danish pubcaster DR.

 

Birro's new television series is inspired by US drama The Wire - five seasons on HBO - and based on real-life events in Malmö and Copenhagen: social problems provoking gang-related crime in Malmö's Rosengård ghetto extending to the underworld of Copenhagen; police action groups trying to fight it; political cooperation between the two countries focussing on the the problems of integration; and the personal dramas which are the result of it all.

 

Previously in-house producer with Denmark's Zentropa Entertainments, where she realised, among others, three Lars von Trier films, the last was Melancholia (2011). In 2010 she set up her own production company with Danish producer Sara Namer; in Sweden they collaborate with Sonet Film/Television's Peter Possne and Breidablick Film's Gila Bergqvist Ulfung.