Finland’s Liselott Forsman, a former executive producer of international drama at Finnish public broadcaster YLE , has been appointed new CEO of the Nordisk Film & TV Fond, the dynamic Nordic region film and TV financier.
Forsman will take up her position on Oct. 7, succeeding Petri Kemppinen who is relocating to Finland after a near six-year mandate to spend more time with his family.
Established in 1990, and handling a NOK 97.75 million ($11.4 million) budget for 2019, the NFTVF is backed by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the five Nordic film institutes and 12 Nordic television channels.
NFTVF’s primary brief is to boost high-quality film and TV productions in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden by putting up top-up financing for feature films, TV-fiction, series and creative documentaries.
To this task Forsman, also chair of the EBU Fiction Expert Group, can bring a large passion for the importance of screenwriting – she co-founded Helsinki Script – and an insider’s knowledge of the challenges facing public broadcasting in Scandinavia. particularly in attracting younger audiences via the digital space, as its financing decisions still drive much of Scandinavia content production.
Liselott also served at YLE as its scripted fiction plunged into ever more adventurous international competition, seen in the upcoming “Paradise,” a YLE-Mediapro crime thriller set on Spain’s Costa del Sol, and “Invisible Heroes,” a 1973 Pinochet coup set drama produced by YLE and Chilevision.
Under the forward-thinking Kemppinen, the Nordisk Film & TV Fond made distribution support more flexible and platform-neutral and launched a Nordic Distribution Boost to aid distributors and producers of middle-sized movies. He also created the the Goteborg Fest’s Nordisk Film & TV Fond Prize for best screenplays, and raised support for documentaries and drama series, which now receives almost equal support to film.
“Liselott has an outstanding track record in production and script development, an acute sense of local, Nordic and global perspective, and a deep understanding of the challenges that the Nordic film and TV industry is facing,” said Stine Helgeland, chairwoman of the NFTVF’s board of directors.:
She added: “In recent years, she has been at the forefront of the TV drama transformation, and a sought-after international commentator and expert in Nordic TV drama.”
“As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I tend to look at the world with a double gaze, being interested in both small and big players, with a special focus on Nordic co-operation and international strategies,” Liselott Forsman commented.
She went on: “Now global interest for Nordic bridge building has increased radically – partly due to an international competition that gets harsher day by day; new challenges are facing us all. It is vital to know that the Fund is standing strong, thanks to the great work of my predecessor Petri Kemppinen and the team at Nordisk Film & TV Fond.”