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Breaking The Waves and Dancer In The Dark director leads Nordic clean-up of Scottish movie grants;Viking raid on lottery film cash

The Vikings are invading. Top Nordic film companies, including the producer of last year's Cannes winner Dancer In The Dark, have teamed up with Scots film makers to shoot four films on this side of the North Sea in 2002.

The projects have all been backed with lottery grants from Scottish Screen, which has just handed out awards of up to (pounds) 400,000 to a total of five films in its latest funding round. Of the five, four have backing from Nordic film producers. Zentropa Films, the Danish company at the heart of the Dogme movement, will be investing in two of the projects. The outfit is part-owned by Lars von Trier, who directed Breaking The Waves and Dancer In The Dark, which won its star, Bj degrees rk, best actress award at Cannes.

Von Trier's company has put money into Vilbur Wants To Kill Himself, a black comedy about two brothers who run a bookshop in Glasgow. One is newly married but terminally ill, the other is a manic depressive who wants to kill himself. The film will be directed by Lone Scherfig, a Danish woman, whose feature Italian For Beginners is currently amassing awards on the international circuit. It will be co-produced by Gillian Berrie, who made her first feature, The Last Great Wilderness, in Scotland this year and is raising finance for another project, Young Adam, in which Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton have agreed to play the lead roles.

Zentropa is also investing in Little Sisters, Scottish writer Andy Goddard's first feature-length film, about the coming of age of a group of young Scottish girls. Goddard and producer Oscar van Heek both cut their teeth through the Tartan Shorts film scheme run by Scottish Screen and the BBC. Goddard wrote the short Rice Paper Stars, which was set entirely in a nightclub ladies' loo and featured comedienne Karen Dunbar, and last year's award-winning half-hour drama Kings Of The Wild Frontier, which he co-wrote with Ian Rankin as part of the New Found Land scheme run by Sunday Herald parent SMG and Scottish Screen.

Mission Impossible star Dougray Scott has teamed up with writer/director Stewart Swarsand, a Scot who has made short films in Norway, and Norse company Motleys to executive produce The Bums' Rush. Scott's London company Hero Films is the UK partner. A dark comedy, it is set in the Highlands and features a group of 20-something slackers who see a way out when they find what seems to be gold in the hills.

Scott hopes to make a cameo appearance, and might corral some of his famous friends into doing so too. Bums' Rush will be his second film as a producer - he is currently co-producing and starring in the historical epic Cromwell and Fairfax.

Finally David Muir, producer of the Irvine Welsh-penned trilogy The Acid House, will be working with Denmark's Nimbus films and director Sren Kragh -Jacobsen, whose 1999 feature Mifune was an international success.

Skaggerak, written by Kragh-Jacobsen, is a Thelma and Louise style-story about two friends who yearn to settle down, and how one of them raises money through a surrogate pregnancy.

Berrie has been working hard to forge links with Nordic film-makers. In September 2000, the Sunday Herald reported that she had signed a co-production deal with three Danish companies, including Zentropa, to produce films in Scotland. Now Zentropa has opened two outposts in Glasgow: Zentropa UK, and Zyomsis, which will develop scripts and produce medium-budget UK feature films.

The deals come at a time when Danish and neighbouring film makers, having achieved international acclaim, want to break into a more mainstream world market by making films in English.

Rather than importing English-speaking actors, the Danes and Norwegians think it will be cheaper to make their films in the UK, and Scotland can provide some of the best locations.

Berrie says: "The Danes, having done very well with their Danish language films, know that for more international appeal, especially in America, more of their films will have to be in English. Scotland is the same latitude, has the same rotten climate, and so there is a natural affinity between the two countries. The Danes feel that the Scots are very good storytellers, whereas they feel they are very good at structuring stories."

Steve McIntyre, chief executive of Scottish Screen, said he hoped this first batch of films would be the beginning of a long-term collaboration between Nordic and Scottish producers: "What we hope is that it is the start of something as well as the end of a period of development. We hope these companies work well together and form partnerships on future projects.

"They are bringing their international experience to Scottish companies and allowing us access to new sources of funding because the film funds in the Nordic countries are fairly well-endowed, unlike ours."

The fact that British Midland run direct flights between Scotland and Copenhagen is helping collaboration between the Nordic companies and Scotland.

Next year, the film agency is planning a trip to meet producers in Gothenberg, Sweden. Two years ago, its previous chief executive John Archer visited Film City outside Copenhagen, where Zentropa and Nimbus are based.

McIntyre has also attended the annual Nordic Documentary Forum for the last few years. And six weeks ago, the Film Council invited 30 or so Scandinavian film -makers to meet and talk to their British counterparts at a meeting in London's Soho House media club.

©2001 smg sunday newspapers ltd.