17-10-2007

Svensk Filmindustri at CentEast with two Warsaw festival titles

By Jorn Rossing Jensen

    Warsaw (CentEast Daily News) -- Represented at the CentEast Market by vp international sales Anita Simovic, Swedish major, Svensk Filmindustri, is racking up sales for two Scandinavian movies, Danish director Peter Schønau Fog's The Art of Crying (Kunsten at græde i kor) and Norwegian director Petter Næss' Gone with the Woman (Tatt av kvinnen), both selected for competitions at the Warsaw International Film Festival.

    Screening in the New Films, New Directors-International Competition and the Warsaw Competition, respectively, The Art of Crying and Gone with the Woman are frequent travelers on the international festival circuit. Most recently (Oct. 6) Fog, who is in Warsaw, bagged two awards at the Reykjavik International Film Festival.

    The Art of Crying, which will receive the Nordic Council's Film Prize in Oslo on Oct. 31-it comes with $65,000 (€47,000)-bagged 15 international awards before it was released in Denmark. Shortlisted for the European Film Award, the film took 228,000 admissions domestically. It follows an 11-year-old boy's efforts to keep his family together, with little help from a suicidal father.

    Norwegian lead actor Trond Fausa Aurvåg has now left the Warsaw festival to attend the U.S. première of Gone with the Woman, which yesterday (Oct. 17) opened the Hollywood Film Festival in Los Angeles. Aurvåg was accompanied by Swedish actor Peter Stormare, and will later be joined by director Næss.

    Based on Norwegian author Erlend Loe's 1993 debut novel about a young, rather sensitive man and his experiences with love, Gone with the Woman was first staged as a play in Oslo. The film will also launch the Nordic Film Days in Lübeck (Oct. 31-Nov. 4) and the Scanorama Film Festival in Vilnius, Lithuania (Nov. 9-29).