29/08/2008

Jonathan Levine’s Sundance Audience Award winner The Wackness receives £170,000 from the UK Film Council in its latest round of Prints and Advertising Fund awards allowing Revolver Films to double screen numbers from 50 to 100.

Shane Meadows’ Somers Town [+see also:
trailer
film profile] received £140,000. Thanks to this, distributor Optimum Releasing could widen the release to 60 screens and splash out on an enhanced advertising campaign.

Metrodome got £43,418 for Hong-jin Na’s Korean serial-killer thriller The Chaser, to pay for additional prints, digital distribution and advertising costs; and £5,000 to widen the distribution of Santosh Sivan’s Before the Rains, about an English spice merchant who settles in Kerala during British colonial rule in 1937.

In addition, the following awards were made to broaden the availability of the following: Bloom Street Productions received £5,000 for Karl Francis’ human trafficking drama Hope Eternal. Artificial Eye received £5,000 for The Banishment, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s follow up to the The Return; £5,000 for Reha Erdem’s acclaimed Turkish drama Times and Winds; and £4,976 for Eric Rohmer’s Romance of Astrea and Celadon [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a rural love story set in fifth century Gaul.

Momentum Pictures received £5,000 for Nic Balthazar’s Belgian hit Ben X [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Nic Balthazar
interview: Peter Bouckaert
film profile] while Lions Gate UK received £5,000 for Angel [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], François Ozon’s first English language film.

Trinity Filmed Entertainment received £5,000 for Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The Works received £5,000 for Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

In addition Slingshot Productions received £5,000 for Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a music documentary about Iraq’s first heavy metal band.