Gustav Möller’s The Guilty wins the Audience Award and Ísold Uggadóttir’s And Breathe Normally Best Director-World Cinema Dramatic.

Möller’s first feature was among the hottest titles at Robert Redford’s leading US film festival and was picked up by Magnolia Pictures for North American distribution.

The Sundance award is the second accolade for The Guilty, first pitched as an idea at Copenhagen’s Nordic Talents 2015 where the writer/director and his producer Lina Flint (Nordisk Film Spring) won a Special Mention.  The Guilty was co-written by Möller with Emil Nygaard Albertsen.

Jacob Cedergren plays Asger Holm, an alarm dispatcher and former police officer who answers an emergency call from a kidnapped woman. When the call is suddenly disconnected, the search for the woman and her kidnapper begins. With the phone as his only tool, Asger enters a race against time to save the endangered woman.

The Danish film produced with the support of the Danish Film Institute’s New Danish Screen will be released in Denmark on June 14, 2018. TrustNordisk handles world sales.  The Guilty is also competing in Rotterdam for the €30,000 VPRO Big Screen Award, and screening at Göteborg’s Nordic Light programme.

Read here about Gustav Möller: CLICK HERE.

And Breathe Normally is the first feature from Icelandic writer/director Ísold Uggadóttir, multi-awarded for her short films Revolution Reykjavík and Family Reunion. It’s the story of two women-a struggling Icelandic mother and an asylum seeker from Guinea-Bissau, whose lives intersect as both strategize to get their lives back on track. 

“I developed the story when I became friend with a Ugandan woman in Iceland, who sought asylum,” told the director to nordicfilmandtvnews.com. “It was clear to me that there was a great void between reality and what we were seeing on screen in Iceland and I began fiercely researching and immersing myself in the world of asylum seeker issues. Today, the topic is timelier than ever.”

And Breathe Normally was produced by Skúli Malmquist for Zik Zak Filmworks and coproduced by Inga Lind Karlsdóttir, Lilja Ósk Snorradóttir, Birna Anna Björnsdóttir, along with Belgium’s Entre Chien et Loup and Sweden’s Cinenic Film. The Match Factory handles world sales. 

And Breathe Normally is competing this week for the Dragon Award in Göteborg. The Icelandic release is set for February 23. 

Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize World Cinema Dramatic-awarded last year to Sweden’s The Nile Hilton Incident - went this year to Turkey’s Butterflies and the section’s Special Jury Award for Acting went to Hanaa Issa for the Argentinian film The Queen of Fear co-produced by Denmark’s Snowglobe.