In less than a year, thanks to the quality Swedish arthouse films Sebbe and She Monkeys that won several major festival awards and the box office success of the Finnish film Lapland Odyssey, Yellow Affair has rapidly established a solid reputation among Nordic sales agents. The company is now owned by the major Finnish media and publishing group Yellow Film & TV Oy, Helsinki Film, one of Finland's most active production outfits, Paasilinna's own company Visiorex (specialised in children's programmes and documentaries) and Sweden's Anagram Production. "Anagram is a strong partner, active both on the arthouse and commercial end of the market," said Paasilinna. We want to be a producers' company and are bigger and stronger with Anagram. To make the relationship with its production partners flow as easily as possible, Paasilinna stressed that not all films and TV dramas from her production partners are handled by Yellow Affair.
In Cannes, the company introduced the Swedish genre film Gone by Mattias Olsson that was acquired by CTV International for France. Lisa Aschan's She Monkeys, recent winner of Best World Narrative Feature at Tribeca, was finalised with Sweden (Tri Art) and acquired by Maywin Media for Russia/CIS. A dozen territories had already acquired the Swedish drama. Four More Years, the directorial debut of Swedish actress Tova Magnusson was picked up by Pro-Fun Media from Germany and the Swedish/US documentary film A Bitter Taste of Freedom by Marina Goldovovskaya was acquired by Maywin Media for Russia/CIS. Iranian state television IRIB picked up a package of four films: Sebbe -by Iranian born Babak Najafi-, the Finnish film Blackout, Finnish/Irish co-production Parked and Finnish/German co-production Parked.
Commenting on the market, Paasilinna said buyers were back on the negotiation tables, but prices were still not at the 2009 level. Key European territories such as France and the UK were active buyers in Cannes, but financial pressure was visible with distributors from Spain and Hungary.