The established commercials and feature film director Jonas Arnby had his breakthrough with the chiller When Animals Dream, co-written by Rasmus Birch, which was sold to more than 20 territories including the US, after its 2014 Cannes Critics Week world premiere. 

His new project, written again by Birch, tells of insurance broker Max, whose life is about one thing - keeping his walnut brain tumour in check. He eats properly, exercises and lives properly, but all of this self-consciousness makes him more and more depressed. When he realises that his beloved wife plans to leave him, he decides to take his own life.

But that doesn’t quite work as planned, but a solution seems near-at-hand when he finds that he can check in at a suicide hotel. In front of him, an adventure is waiting to teach Max about the joy of life and of course the inevitability of death.  The film is produced by Snowglobe’s Eva Jakobsen, Katrin Pors and Mikkel Jersin, in co-production with Mer Film’s Maria Ekerhovd. The premiere is set for May 2019. The €4.4m film just received NOK3m (€315.357) support from the Norwegian Film Institute. 

In its latest round of support to minority Norwegian co-productions, the NFI also awarded NOK2m (€210,300) to the German film The Sunlit Night by David Wnendt (Look Who’s Back). The film is written by Rebecca Dinerstein from her own best-selling debut novel of the same name. It tells of a painter who travels from Brooklyn to an artist colony in Lofoten, Norway. The €3m project is produced by Germany’s Detail Film, in co-production with Ruben Thorkildsen and Isak Eymundsson of Ape & Bjørn. The premiere is set for early 2019.