News

Leading Danish actor Trine Dyrholm, who headlined Oscar winner “In a Better World” and Sundance Audience Award winner “Queen of Hearts,” is to star in four-part miniseries “Dependency.”

Maren-Louise Käehne, whose credits include “Queen of Hearts,” “Blackwater” and “The Legacy,” has written the screenplay, which is adapted from the autobiographical novel of the same name by Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen.

Apple Tree Productions, the Danish company headed by “The Killing” producer Piv Bernth and Lars Hermann, is producing the show, and Danish broadcaster TV2 is on board, Bernth told Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.

Ditlevsen will be played by four actors in four periods of her life, from the late 1930s to her death in 1976, with Dyrholm playing the author and poet in her final years.

The miniseries starts on the final day of her life as she tidies up her financial affairs and delivers her last manuscript to her publisher.

Apple Tree Productions, the Danish company headed by “The Killing” producer Piv Bernth, is reteaming with the creative duo behind feelgood period drama “Chorus Girls,” Ditte Hansen and Louise Mieritz, Bernth told Variety at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.

Hansen and Mieritz are in development on a comedy-drama series, with the working title “Feelings and Things,” set in a shopping mall in contemporary Denmark. It will have the same underlying message as “Chorus Girls”: “We are stronger together,” Bernth said.

“People working in the shops in the malls get really badly paid but they keep selling things to people who don’t really need them really,” Bernth said.

Danish broadcaster TV2 is a partner on the new show, which will go into production next year.

Hansen and Mieritz are co-writing and will co-direct.

Apple Tree is also attached to a TV adaptation of Tove Ditlevsen’s autobiographical novel “Dependency,” with TV2 on board,...

Liv Ullmann on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl: “It’s so inspiring to me!” Photo: Ed Bahlman

In the second instalment with Liv Ullmann we discussed her 1973 Best Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award nomination for her performance in Jan Troell’s The Emigrants; writer Tove Ditlevsen; being 13 and also very grown up at the same time; Some Like it Hot on Broadway, starring Christian Borle and J Harrison Ghee and Billy Wilder’s film with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, directing Faithless, screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (starring Lena Endre and Erland Josephson) and forgiving yourself, and being nervous with Laurence Olivier when they starred in A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough.

Liv Ullmann was in New York for two Doc NYC selections, Dheeraj Akolkar’s all-embracing Liv Ullmann: A Road Less Travelled (a highlight of the 14th edition) where Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain,...

Exclusive: Director-writer duo May el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Käehne, who previously collaborated on 2019 Sundance hit Queen Of Hearts, are re-teaming with scandi major Nordisk Film Production on Dependency, an adaptation of an autobiographical novel by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen.

Producing the project will be Lina Flint, who founded Nordisk’s talent department Spring and has credits including The Guilty, which is being remade by Jake Gyllenhaal and Netflix, and the upcoming comedy Wild Men.

May el-Toukhy will be the series’ conceptual director and Käehne will be the lead writer. Nordisk secured rights to the 1971 book from the publishing house Gyldendal.

The four-part show will portray influential author Tove Ditlevsen’s four marriages with four vastly different men. It promises to be a brutally honest and unsentimental story about her being torn between the roles of artist, mother, wife and addict.

“Tove Ditlevsen’s life constitutes, in all its devil-may-care complexity,...