WRITTEN BY: Annika Pham
Haugesund’s film market will be back as normal fully on-site from August 23-26, with a curated programme of 60 of the best Nordic projects and finished films.
After two years of online and hybrid sessions, Haugesund’s 28th New Nordic Films is ready to welcome back 300+ industry people, fans of Nordic content and talents.
“We are looking forward to having people in Haugesund, with an almost normal market,” said head of industry Gyda Velvin Myklebust, who underlines the large number of attendees from Europe, counterbalancing the lack of professionals from overseas. “This is part of the aftermath of Covid-19. Air fares are expensive, Covid cases are still quite high in Asia, and many companies are still struggling” she noted.
Myklebust also witnessed the effects of Covid on the projects submitted, with a record number of films in development. “We had a hard time selecting projects for the Nordic Co-Production Market,” admitted the industry curator, who ultimately picked 23 projects, looking for co-financing, co-production and sales.
Thematically extremely diverse, this year’s Nordic Co-production Market line-up includes a large number of feature debuts (12), many by promising female directors, such as The Blowfish by Norway’s Elin Övergaard, The Soft Skin by Sweden’s Minka Jakerson, and The Braid by Angelika Abramovitch. The latter picked up the Special Mention award at Nordic Talents 2019, an accolade collected a year earlier by Norway’s Brwa Vahabpour, also present at the Co-Production Market with his ambitious feature Europe, produced by True Content Production Norway.
Other projects in development to watch out for include A Gift to My Mother by US-born Aaron Brookner (Uncle Howard), the iron-age set thriller Stranger by Denmark’s Mads Hedegaard, and tragi-comedy Anything for Her by Faroese multi-awarded Andrias Høgenni.
The 18 Works in Progress titles set to reach cinemas this winter or spring 2023 are also varied in genre, with some ambitious features for a wider audience, such as Crazy Pictures’ sci-fi project UFO Sweden from the Swedish collective Crazy Pictures. The film received support from Nordisk Film & TV Fond, alongside the other works in progress A Happy Day by Norway’s Hisham Zaman (Letter to the King), Four Little Adults by Finland’s Selma Vilhunen (Stupid Young Heart) and Listen Up! by Norway’s Kaveh Tehrani.
Meanwhile director Teemu Nikki and producer Jani Pösö of It’s Alive Films (The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic, Mister8) will pitch their latest genre-bending trip The Player, about addiction, friendship and forgiveness, starring Pekka Strang, and Oscar-nominated Nils Gaup’s period drama The Riot.
Most of the Works in progress are still available for global sales and all projects at the Nordic Co-Production Market are open for sales at press time.
Among the 19 market screenings, several titles are coming straight from Cannes - from Triangle of Sadness, Boy from Heaven, The Woodcutter Story, to Sick of Myself.
“We try to select the most recent features, based on their quality and international potential. But in a way, market screenings are in a changing phase,” noticed Myklebust, who sees a greater interest from the industry for festival screenings.
Indeed Haugesund’s own festival -the Norwegian Film Festival celebrating 50 years from August 20-26, will be screening a large array of high-profile Nordic features across its programme, notably in the Nordic Focus, Next Nordic Generation and Nordic Council Film Prize section.
Haugesund will also stage several seminars, focusing on diversity, talent development and distribution.
The panel ‘Nourishing New Voices Without Killing their Vibes’ on Wednesday August 24 between 16.45-18.00 will be co-hosted by Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The first part of the session will be a dialogue between Nathalie Álvarez Mesén (Clara Sola) and Franciska Eliassen (What Grows Where Land is Sick?) who will discuss the roads to premiering their films in Cannes and Locarno respectively.
The two rising directors will then sit on the panel ‘How to Best Nourish New Talents’, alongside producer Helen Ahlsson, Tina í Dali Wagner, Head of the Faroese Film Institute, and producer Yngve Sæther (Motlys, Norway). The panel will be moderated by Liselott Forsman, CEO at Nordisk Film & TV Fond.
Other panels include:
- ‘Books in Haugesund’,
- ‘Force Majeure: How the Industry Can Win Audiences Off the Sofa and Back to Cinemas’, co-hosted by Europa Distribution,
- ‘Creating a Producer’s Network and Sharing Knowledge’, co-hosted by EAVE.
For the full New Nordic Films programme, check: https://www.newnordicfilms.no/
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