“We all feel that there is a lack of projects of this type in Sweden and wish to help initiate them,” said Hanne Palmquist, Commissioning Editor Feature Films & TV Drama at SVT. “It’s important to have a wide range of films to show our TV-audience – and thereby also high quality for a wide audience”.
"Our effort can be seen as a vitamin shot into the Swedish film sector that needs to improve production values in order to reach a broader audience", said Tomas Eskilsson, CEO of Film i Väst.
The new partnership will provide seed money for more ambitious projects with budgets ranging from $4-6 million, twice the size of the current Swedish average. Each project with a potential to reach more than 500,000 Swedes –whatever the genre - will be eligible for a maximum of SEK 25 million from the three co-producers. World sales will be handled by TrustNordisk.
Applications can be submitted all year round and the collaboration between the three partners will run 2015-017.
Recent commercially-oriented Swedish projects that correspond to the type of projects targeted by the three partners include The 100 Year-old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared and Bamse and the City of Thieves.