Benni Korzen (Oscar-winning Babette's Feast) has acquired the Swedish book Red Carnations of the Sound by Conny Palmkvist, the true story of four young Danish men who, in 1943, the year Hitler instructed the Gestapo to capture the Danish Jews, saved 1,400 of them (including Korzen himself! as a child), by ferrying them across the Sound to neutral Sweden in small boats at night, braving the choppy freezing water and the Nazi patrol boats. Korzen has brought on Barney Cohen (Guernica), who will collaborate with the book's author on the mini-series, The Elsinore Sewing Club, the evocative code name the four men chose for their endeavor.
Also producing is Gabriel Grunfeld.
Benni Korzen comments, "I have made many movies in many places about many things, but I've never attempted anything as grand and important to today's world as this less well-known piece of history."
The window is closing on first-hand accounts of the Second World War as the surviving heroes and villains leave us. This book, currently available only in Denmark, Sweden, and The Czech Republic, is appealing to filmmakers. The author began by extensively interviewing the daughter of one of the heroes, which is where he heard the story of Korzen's rescue. The rest of the book and the people in it result from Palmkvist's scrupulous research.
Barney Cohen states, "I came aboard because this is a tremendous story that I see as Schindler's List meets the Howard Hawks, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner movie, To Have and Have Not, and I look forward, with Conny Palmkvist, to pull it off."
Conny Palmkvist says, "I started crying as I wrote the last words - taken with the sacrifice of these men and women for strangers in the darkest period of mankind. They asked for nothing but gave everything. Still, they remain an almost untold story of courage, in the words truest meaning."
Benni or the production can be reached at BenniKorzen@gmail.com
