WW1 drama In War & Love directed by Kasper Torsting will be co-produced by Studio Hamburg in Germany.

The WW1 drama In War & Love directed by Kasper Torsting will be co-produced by Studio Hamburg in Germany. The ambitious DKK 35m (€4.7m) film is loosely based on the book Knacker by Karsten Skov adapted for the screen by Torsting and German scriptwriter Astrid Ströher.

Torsting was creative producer of Armadillo and received several awards for his documentaries Solo (2007) and Rocket Brothers (2013). He just directed his first TV drama –Ø for Studio Plus in France.

In War & Love tells the story of Danish soldier Esben who comes back home to his wife Kristine and little boy after two years on the battlefield. But his son doesn’t remember him and a German officer – Gebhardt- has become an intimate of the family. Gebhardt gets rid of Esben by sending him to the front again. But Esben flees and ends up hiding in his own attic. He slowly witnesses the German officer take his place in his own family and he faces the dilemma of how far one can go in love and war.

The film is produced by Mille Bjørke and Ronnie Fridthjof of Fridthjof Film, in association with TV2, Nordisk Film Distribution, with support from the Danish Film Institute’s German/Danish Co-production Development Initiative, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein (FFHSH) and Sønderborg Municipality. Fridthjof expects the film to get the final greenlight in September.

Fridthjof Film is enjoying the successful theatrical run of Rasmus Heide’s All for Three, top selling Danish film of 2017 with 309,000 admissions. The two instalments in the comedy series also sold more than 300,000 tickets each.

The production company co-owned by Nordisk Film has just hired producer Marcella Dichmann who will run Fridthjof Film’s family and genre film division. Dichmann worked previously at Zentropa and most recently at Asa Film where she produced several Father of Four films and the Crystal Bear nominated The Contest: To the Stars and Back.

Two Fridthjof Film TV dramas should start production in the fall: the eco thriller Mayday based on a script by Norwegian writer Christopher Grøndahl (Børning) and The Specialists, first pitched at Series Mania 2016.