09/07/2013 - Norwegian author Erlend Loe and Motlys producer Yngve Sæther will share the director’s chair for the film starring Norwegian actress Anne Marit Jacobsen

Norwegian author Erlend Loe and producer Yngve Sæther (photo) will share the director’s chair for Loe’s black comedy, Inventory, which is currently in development for Oslo-based production shingle Motlys.

Originally a screenplay, Inventory has been adapted by Loe for a novel, which Norway’s Cappelen Damm published in April, and which also has been sold to Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Slovakia and Serbia. It follows a 66-year-old poet on the very day she issues her last collection of poems. In the morning her publisher calls her: the reviews are not too good. The bookstore, where she is supposed to take part in a reading, cancels due to an inventory problem. So she sets out in the city, realising she is about to do her own inventory of her life and contemporary society.

According to Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Loe and Sæther have known each other from the early 1990s, when Sæther used Loe as an actor in a short film. “He is a great story teller, and we felt we could pull this project together. Few films deal with aging people who often feel rejected by society once they have passed their ‘use-by-date’,” explained Sæther, an in-house producer at Motlys, where he has three times been nominated for an Amanda – Norway’s national film prize – and won for Stian Kristiansen’s The Man Who Loved Yngve [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2008).

Norwegian actress Anne Marit Jacobsen, who has been in 40 Norwegian films – most recently Dag Johan Haugerud’s I Belong (2012) – will star in the film, which will be produced by Hans-Jørgen Osnes (and Sæther) for Motlys. Sæther, who produced I Belong, will shortly (August 9) premiere Kristiansen’s Kiss Me, You Fucking Moron, about a theatre group of teenagers staging a play under the direction of a professional actor in the middle of a life crisis, with Kristoffer Joner and Eli Harboe in the leads.