Norway scores with three Sundance competition entries - Denmark and Finland bring minor co-pros

Rising director Thea Hvistendahl will be launching her first fiction film Handling the Undead
at the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition where top Nordic directors Tarek Saleh and Gustav Möller earned major kudos with their respective thrillers The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and The Guilty (2018).

The character-driven horror/drama Handling the Undead is adapted by horror specialist writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (Border, Let the Right One In) from his own eponymous book. The star ensemble cast includes The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, as well as seasoned actors Bjørn Sundquist and Bente Børsum.

Speaking earlier to us - (Haugesund - Einar Film ups scripted content with Jens Lien’s Joe’s Assignment) producer Kristin Emblem of Einar Film Drama said the film is the result of a tight collaboration between Hvistendahl and Lindqvist. “Thea has always been fascinated by John’s universe. We read ‘Handling the Undead’, acquired the rights and set up a meeting between Thea and John who immediately connected. Thea has taken full visual and conceptual control of the project and gained John’s trust,” she explained.

The story is set on an abnormally hot summer day in Oslo, when a strange electric field surrounds the city, awakening the newly dead and spreading collective migraines across town. Three families have to face their loss, while trying to figure out what this resurrection means. Hvistendahl says that her goal has been “to create a beautiful and exciting cinematic experience, a movie that is both sad and full of love, about pain and acceptance and moving on after you've lost someone you love”.

Handling the Undead was produced by Kristin Emblem and Guri Neby for Einar Film in co-production with Zentropa Sweden, and support among others from Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

The Norwegian premiere via Nordisk Film is set for February 9, 2024. US leading indie distributor Neon has picked up rights for North America and the UK. TrustNordisk handles world sales.

Three Nordic co-productions are also among the 10-title World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Brief History of a Family by Chinese writer/director Jianjie Lin, is the first official co-production between China (First Light Films) and Denmark (Tambo Film), also co-produced with France’s Films du Milieu.

The film which was shortlisted for the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab, features a middle-class family’s fate, as they become intertwined with their only son’s enigmatic new friend in post one-child policy China, putting unspoken secrets, unmet expectations, and untended emotions under the microscope.

Tambo Film’s producer Rikke Tambo Andersen says she boarded the project after meeting up with Lin (a graduate from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts) and his Chinese producer at the Torino Film Lab where the film won the Co-Production Award in 2018.

“The director is so talented and bright, and I think he’s made a film that has rarely been seen on an international level – about Chinese contemporary, big city, middle class life. The film focuses on macro-social evolution in Chinese society through the prism of a family, the way we could analyse an organism through its first cell,” Tambo Andersen tells us.

The film was backed by the Danish Film Institute.

Sebastian is directed by up and coming London-based Finnish writer/director Mikko Mäkela, named by IndieWire as one of 25 LGBTQ filmmakers on the rise - see story here.

The film stars Ruaridh Mollica as Max, a 25-year-old aspiring writer living in London, who begins a double life as a sex worker in order to research his debut novel.

The majority UK production from Bêtes sauvages, is co-produced by Belgium and Finland’s Helsinki-filmi, with backing from Aurora Studios’ Finnish Impact Film Fund, the Finnish Film Foundation and Yle.

"It's wonderful to be able to share the film with the public for the first time at Sundance, whose programme line that values artistic independence and courage I've always admired," said Mäkelä.

Girls Will Be Girls by Indian writer/director/producer Shuchi Talati is an Indian/French/Norwegian co-production, spearheaded in Norway by Hummelfilm with backing from the Norwegian Film Institute’s Sørfond.

In a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira discovers desire and romance. But her sexual, rebellious awakening is disrupted by her mother who never got to come of age herself.

Meanwhile in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, no doubt Benjamin Ree’s Ibelin will be one of the section’s hottest titles, considering the success of his previous film The Painter and the Thief which picked up in Sundance 2020 its first of a swathe of top international prizes. Ibelin has in fact the honour to screen at Park City’s prestigious Egyptian Theatre on the festival’s opening day, according to the Norwegian Film Institute.

The film is a portrait of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, who died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world. The film recreates Mats' adventurous online life as Ibelin, his avatar from the World of Warcraft.

In a statement, Ree said he and his team took artistic risks, “as we recreate an actual lived avatar life with game graphics, mixed with family videos and interviews. This has never been done before in this way, so we are extremely excited to see how this storytelling approach will be received.”

The film was produced by Ingvil Giske for Medieoperatørene, with support from the Norwegian Film Institute. The Norwegian premiere is set for March 2024. Autlook Film sales handles global sales.

Also competing for best world documentary in Sundance is A New Kind of Wilderness by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen, Prix Europa -TV Iris Award winner in 2021 for Faith Can Move Mountains.

In her kind of real-life version of the Viggo Mortensen vehicle Captain Fantastic, Evensmo Jacobsen has followed The Payne family who live an isolated and eco-friendly lifestyle on a small farm in a Norwegian forest. Maria and Nik, together with their four children, embrace self-sufficiency, home-schooling and want to live an independent family life in harmony with nature. To make ends meet, Maria occasionally works as a photographer. She also captures her family, sharing their life through photos and stories on her blog, 'wildandfree'. But their world turns upside down when tragedy strikes and the family reluctantly has to go back to modern society.

The film was produced by Evensmo Jacobsen’s A5 Film, with backing from the Norwegian Film Institute, NRK, DR and SVT. DR Sales handles global sales.

DR Sales’ executive producer Kim Christiansen who has followed the project very closely from an early stage said: “We are very pleased to have the Nordic Broadcasters NRK, SVT, DR on board. I believe it shows how important the public service collaboration between the broadcasters in the Nordic region is, and what big and important films we are able to produce together.”

“A New Kind of Wilderness is a film that has touched my heart from the very first visuals that I was presented. It’s a film that resembles fiction (and beyond) in great story telling and cinematic style, but at the same time deals with extremely important topics that, in a contemporary global society, concerns us all,” Christiansen added.

A total of 82 feature-length films from 24 countries, and 8 episodic titles were unveiled December 6 by the Sundance Film Festival, set to celebrate in 2024 its 40^th anniversary between January 25-28.

Robert Redford, Sundance Institute Founder and President said: "From the first edition in 1985, Sundance Film Festival has aimed to provide a space to gather, celebrate, and engage with risk-taking artists that are committed to bringing their independent visions to audiences - the Festival remains true to that goal to this day,” he underlined. “It continues to evolve, but its legacy of showcasing bold work that starts necessary conversations continues with the 2024 program."

As a proof of the large number of global productions that waited finalisation and distribution post-Covid, a record number of titles were submitted this year: 17,435 from 153 countries or territories, including 4,410 feature-length films. Around 40% of the feature films are from first time filmmakers.

The films will screen at Park City and Salt Lake City’s cinemas from January 18, and a selection of titles (notably from the World Cinema and Documentary sections) will also be offered online exclusively via festival.sundance.org.