EFA Nominee ‘Cop Secret’ Picked Up For Scandinavia By Njuta Movies

Stockholm-based Njuta Movies has boarded Hannes Þór Halldórsson’s “Cop Secret,” snagging theatrical rights to Scandinavia after a bidding warfare on the American Movie Market.  

The movie, produced by Iceland’s Pegasus Footage, was just lately nominated for the European Movie Award as finest comedy alongside Fernando León De Aranoa’s “The Good Boss” and Catherine Corsini’s “The Divide.” 

This marks one more rating for the movie’s gross sales agent Alief because it bows one other title 0n its gross sales slate, “Petrol,” on the Marrakech Movie Pageant.  

A comedic actioner a few troubled “supercop” Bússi (Auðunn Blöndal) – who begins to query his sexuality after being assigned a brand new companion, Hörður (Egill Einarsson) – “Cop Secret” has acquired loads of consideration following its Locarno premiere in 2021, additionally attributable to Reykjavík-born helmer’s uncommon background: Hannes Þór Halldórsson was once an expert soccer goalkeeper and member of Iceland’s nationwide workforce. 

“Once I was making ‘Cop Secret,’ I used to be nonetheless taking part in for the nationwide workforce. To offer you an instance, we performed an especially necessary recreation towards Romania solely 4 days after ending the outside pictures of the film in September 2020,” he admits. 

Hannes Þór Halldórsson co-wrote the script with Nína Petersen and Sverrir Þór Sverrisson, who additionally seems within the movie. 

“I retired final yr in October, the identical month we premiered the movie in Iceland. It has been a easy transition and now I’m utterly dedicated to the movie enterprise,” the director stated. 

The movie’s pageant success got here as a shock, he notes, initially contemplating “Cop Secret” to be “means too native” to be seen, not to mention understood, by anybody outdoors of the nation.

“Our intention was at all times to make a enjoyable film for Icelandic moviegoers. This worldwide success, with the EFA nomination being absolutely the climax, has been an enormous and intensely nice shock for us,” he provides.  

Aside from delivering spectacular motion sequences and dry one-liners, he additionally wished to method the principle relationship with “respect and love.” 

“These two important actors have been a comedy duo in Iceland for over a decade, so their chemistry was at all times going to carry a smile to individuals’s faces. My job was so as to add depth and a few drama into the combination, making an attempt to show their relationship into the center and soul of this in any other case loopy film.” All of the whereas paying homage to the films he watched as a teen, slowly discovering cinema again within the Nineteen Nineties. 

“At the moment, mainstream Hollywood cinema was just about the one factor that might attain our shores. I’ve extraordinarily heat and nostalgic emotions in direction of this era,” he says. 

“Motion motion pictures took up a big portion of the film choice and I noticed all of them. These movies, regardless of being massive motion spectacles, had been often made with allure, coronary heart and soul. That’s one thing I used to be striving for whereas making ‘Cop Secret.’”

In response to Alief, the movie has additionally now acquired presents from Ukraine and CIS. Newest gross sales in a powerful worldwide roll-out embrace theatrical launch in Italy with Blue Swan and Portugal with Alambique underneath the Portuguese distributor’s new Daring Cinema label.