16/12/2011

Swedish director Teresa Fabik, who most recently portrayed an overweight teenager struggling to be accepted in Princess (2009), will take Swedish author Kajsa Ingemarsson’s chick-lit bestseller Love and Lemons to the big screen.

The Swedish Film Institute yesterday (December 15)chipped in €1.6 million for eight productions, including €800,000 for Pontus Sjöman’s Tre Vänner production, which will star Rakel Wärmländer, Josefin Bornebusch and Tomas von Brömssen. Fabik, Leif V Johansson and Johan Kindblom have scripted the story of Agnes, a girl who has most things in life but, when her life starts to crumble, she gambles everything she has. Nordisk Film Distribution AB will release domestically on January 25, 2013.

Three actresses are main characters, both in Mariken Halle’s The World Is Waiting and Fia-Stina Sandlund’s She’s Staging It, from Hinden/Länna-Ateljéerna and Negoks Produktion, respectively. In The World, penned by Halle, they are newly trained in summer jobs as waitresses in Oslo, while in Sandlund’s story they meet during an 11-day workshop in upstate New York, where they rehearse Strindberg’s Miss Juliet while trying to save her from the original suicidal ending.

Two Swedish minority productions are also being supported - Irish director Lance Daly’s Life’s a Breeze, with Fionnula Flanagan, Pat Shortt and Kelly Thorton in the leads, which will partly shoot in Sweden next year for Ireland’s Fastnet Films and Sweden’s Anagram produktion and Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, a Mads Mikkelsen-starrer, which is a joint venture between Denmark’s Zentropa Entertainments and Zentropa Sweden/Trollhättan Film.

The institute has also backed three ful-length documentaries, Swedish director Fredrik Gertten’s Big Boys Gone BANANAS!, Swedish Polish-born director Ryszard Solarz’s Du gamla du fria and Swedish directors Kåge Jonsson and Håkan Pieniowski’s Once There Was Love.