Denmark’s experienced producer Thomas Gammeltoft, (pictured) creative director at Eyeworks Fine and Mellow, will put aside his production cap to take the helm of the new Copenhagen Film Fund. The announcement was made on Tuesday.
Gammeltoft has a longstanding career as producer of feature films such as Shake it All About, Stealing Rembrandt and TV series including Album and Lulu & Leon. His long term collaboration with Henrik Ruben Genz has brought to the screens the award-winning film Terribly Happy (2008 Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe winner), Excuse Me (2012), and now the pair are working in London on the English language film Good People starring James Franco, Kate Hudson and Omar Sy.
Gammeltoft’s main tasks as CEO of the Copenhagen Film Fund will be to stimulate inward production investments into the local economy, to keep Danish productions at home and put the Danish capital on the global film map. Officially inaugurated in May, the Fund has a budget of €4.7 million over three years to support 10-15 co-productions -major feature films, TV series and ambitious documentaries and will be fully operation on September 1st, 2013.
Speaking on the phone from London where Good People is in the middle of shooting, Gammeltoft said: “We want to make a difference and support international productions that otherwise would not happen without us. There is tremendous talent in Denmark and in Scandinavia and we want to build on the momentum happening right now. Here in London, I’m amazed to see the number of people who know about The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge, and Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are hot names right now. We want to tell people admiring our talents behind and in front of the camera that they are welcome to come and shoot in the Greater Copenhagen area.”
Gammeltoft hopes the Copenhagen Film Fund will be the first step towards establishing tax incentives in Denmark, a much needed stimulus to attract foreign shoots and fight off competition from other European nations. He also sees the new funding body – independent from the Danish Film Institute -, as a complement to other Scandinavian regional film funds. “We won’t be competitors (to other regional film funds). On the contrary, we hope to collaborate to make Denmark and Scandinavian more attractive to foreign producers,” he stresses.
The producer’s own foreign project Good People has another three weeks shoot in London. Gammeltoft is producing for Millennium Films, with Ben Forkner, Tobey Maguire, Eric Kranzler, and Mark Gill.