Picture Tree Boards Dieter Berner’s Oskar Kokoschka Biopic
Berlin-based Picture Tree Intl. has picked up international sales rights to Dieter Berner’s “Alma & Oskar,” about the passionate relationship between Viennese society grand dame Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, and expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka. PTI will launch the project at Berlin’s European Film Market.
Berner’s last movie, “Egon Schiele – Death and the Maiden,” about another leading artist of the expressionist movement, was sold by PTI to more than 30 territories.
Although engaged to architect Walter Gropius, Alma becomes the focus of Kokoschka’s obsessive love. One of Kokoschka’s most famous paintings, “Bride of the Wind,” portrays her.
The film, written by Berner and Hilde Berger, is a portrait of “two vigorous characters trying to incorporate each other into their own mindscape, whose subjective, distorted view of one another only fuels their dramatic tale of a love affair,” Berner said.
The Austrian-Luxembourgish-German co-production, which is budgeted at 7 million euros ($8.64 million), will be produced by Alexander Glehr and Franz Novotny of Austria’s Novotny & Novotny, and Bady Minck and Alexander Dummreicher-Ivanescu of Luxembourg’s Amour Fou.