21/11/2007

Zentropa’s international sales arm Trust Film Sales, headed by Rikke Ennis, has hired Susan Wendt and Anneli Häkkinen to replace Natja Rosner and Sofie Nyholm, who will be leaving Trust by the end of the year.

The experienced Wendt has spent the last seven years at Nordisk Film International Sales and will join Trust as the new head of sales on January 1, 2008. Häkkinen graduated from law school in Denmark and rapidly turned to media industry sales. Her most recent position was Area Sales Manager at Zodiak Television Worldwide. She will also join Trust early 2008 as sales executive.

Thomas Mai will continue to back the sales team and will be in charge of the fast-expanding area of VOD. Trust’s co-production activities, which Mai used to supervise, will be downscaled as part of Trust and Zentropa’s new strategy to concentrate on bigger international projects developed by its production arms in Sweden and Germany.

“Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth is the typical kind of film we want to be handling in the future. High-profile, quality arthouse films,” stressed Ennis. “We want to be more involved in the films co-produced by Zentropa’s Berlin office, and hope to add German filmmakers to our talent roster.”

The last AFM was “fantastic,” according to Ennis, especially with Mammoth, which sold to Latin America (Sun Distribution) and is in negotiations for Benelux, the UK, Russia, Israel and Turkey. Ennis still wants to wait until next Cannes to really start closing deals.

Anders Morgenthaler’s Echo [+see also:
trailer
film profile] was sold to France (Swift Distribution), and Ole Christian Madsen’s Prague [+see also:
trailer
film profile] to Germany's Galileo, which also acquired Anders Rønnow Klarlund’s How to Get Rid of Others [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

Pernille Fischer Christensen’s new film Everybody’s Dancing attracted a lot of interest from German buyers following the director’s success with A Soap [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lars Bredo Rahbek
interview: Pernille Fischer Christensen
film profile] in Berlin 2007, but Ennis is waiting for the film to be selected at a major festival to start selling it, likewise with Josef Fares’ drama Leo.