18/04/2006

Copenhagen-based production company Cosmo Film is enjoying success at home and abroad with its documentary films: Anders Østergaard’sGasolin, portraying the biggest rock band in Denmark, continues its phenomenal domestic theatrical success with 172,817 admissions in only one month, while Simone Aaberg Kærn and Magnus Bejmar’s Smiling in a War Zone has just won the Women in Leadership Award, which includes a cash prize of €4,100 at the Full Frame Festival in Durham, USA.

In Smiling in a War Zone, her first documentary film, artist and pilot Aaberg Kærn films her own epic flight and journey to Kabul, where she hopes to meet a young Afghan girl who wants to become a fighter pilot. The film was produced by Helle Ulsteen for Cosmo Film’s specialised arm Cosmo Film Doc, with co-financing in Denmark coming from the Danish Film Institute, DR TV/DR2, Flying Enterprise productions, in Sweden from broadcaster SVT and the Swedish Film Institute, in Finland from broadcaster YLE TV1, in Norway from the Nordic Film & TV Fund, in Germany from ZDF Arte and in Canada from broadcaster CBC.

The film will be released theatrically in Sweden on April 28 and later on in Denmark. Canada’s Films Transit is handling international sales.

Cosmo Film, headed by Rasmus Thorsen and Tomas Hostrup-Larsen, produced one of last year’s most successful local films – Oskar & Josefine [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (249,777 admissions) – and has just received DK6.9m (€900,000) in support from the Danish Film Institute to produce a new family film, Guldhornene, based on the TV series Jul I Valhal, to be directed by Martin Schmidt. The film will be distributed by SF Film in 2007.