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Zentropa, the Danish mainstream studio with a separate division that produces adult material, received an Oscar nomination today for Best Live-Action Short for its production At Night.

This follows Zentropa’s Academy Award nomination last year for After the Wedding in the Best Foreign-Language Film. Zentropa has previously received nominations for its feature films Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves.

The latest adult production from Zentropa, All About Anna, will be released in the U.S. by Wicked Pictures on Jan. 29. The slice-of-life romantic comedy -- with explicit erotic scenes -- was directed by Jessica Nilsson and stars Gry Bay, Mark Stevens and Eileen Daly. Zentropa co-owner Peter Aalbæk Jensen, co-executive producer on All About Anna, is also executive producer of At Night.

All About Anna has been shown at several international mainstream film festivals, and last year won three Scandinavian Adult Awards, including Best Scandinavian Couples Film, Best Scandinavian Actor (Thomas Raft) and Best Selling Scandinavian Star (Gry Bay).

Zentropa was founded in 1992 by director Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, who still share an equal ownership of 50 percent of the company.

With the establishment of its adult Puzzy Power line in 1997, Zentropa became the first modern mainstream studio to produce hardcore adult material.

For more information about All About Anna, visit the movie's website.

By Tod Hunter, via XFANZ

+ About Zentropa and Innocent Pictures:

Innocent Pictures ApS is the world's only company producing erotic mainstream feature films with explicit sex. So if high quality filmmaking combined with true erotica sounds like a good idea - look no further!

1. Mission

The goal of Innocent Pictures is to bridge the gap between mainstream and adult, by uniting all the best qualities associated with adult entertainment and mainstream filmmaking into one artistic, commercial and widely palatable package - in short producing the best erotic films ever made.

Furthermore, just as Zentropa is famous for putting out a great variety of product, so Innocent Pictures aims to produce several kinds of adult films, continually pushing the envelope and exploring new exciting areas of erotic cinema, ranging from fully explicit, couples-oriented videos to softer, theatrically released feature films.

2. Background

Innocent Pictures was born as a subsidiary of Zentropa Productions, one of Scandinavia's most influential film production studios.

Zentropa itself was founded in 1992 as a result of the successful co-operation between director Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen on the award-winning feature "Europa".

Over the past ten years, Zentropa has produced more than 50 feature films. Today Zentropa is the largest film production company in Scandinavia, a position the company has maintained since 1994.

Zentropa mainly produces quality features for an international audience but also low budget features as well as Scandinavian, European and American co-productions. The increasing activity of Zentropa includes international commercials, documentary, entertainment programmes for television and development of multimedia projects.

On the 1st of January 1999, Zentropa moved to an old military camp, located between Copenhagen's centre and international airport. Numerous other companies with similar interests - such as EF Rental, Mainstream, Nimbus, Trust Film Sales, Zeitgeist Films, Zentropa Interaction, Zentropa Commerzials and Wise Guy Productions - have moved into this area, thus creating a new European film city similar to Rome's famous Cinecitta. The place in named Filmbyen ("the film city").

Amongst Zentropa's best known productions is Lars von Trier´s Academy Award-nominated "Breaking the Waves", which took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1996 and went on to gross some $30 million worldwide.

Later followed Lars von Trier's likewise Academy Award-nominated musical "Dancer in the Dark", the largest Scandinavian movie project ever made. "Dancer in the Dark", which stars Icelandic pop star Björk and French actress Catherine Deneuve, won the Golden Palm as best film in Cannes 2000, while Björk won the Golden Palm as Best Actress.

In 2003 followed Lars von Trier's "Dogville", starring Nicole Kidman, James Caan, Harriet Andersson, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Paul Bettany, Ben Gazzara and Philip Baker Hall, and provocatively filmed on a black soundstage without any sets. The film was nominated for a Golden Palm in Cannes and has won many major international awards such as the European Film Award for Best Director.

Zentropa is also known for the Dogma-concept ("Dogme95"), a brainchild of Lars von Trier, which demands that directors take a "Vow of Chasity" to refrain from use of camera dollys, musical underscoring, artificial light, etc. Use of the Dogma-concept has continually resulted in critically acclaimed films with international boxoffice succes.

Lars von Trier has always had a profound interest in erotic cinema and so, in 1997 Zentropa started an adult line called Puzzy Power. Zentropa thus became the world's first and only mainstream studio producing hardcore adult films.

Puzzy Power first produced the hardcore films "Constance" (1998) and "Pink Prison" (1999), both starring Katja Kean. Marketed for female audiences, "Constance" and "Pink Prison" have generated considerable international media attention, acchieving a position as the two best-selling sex videos in Scandinavia. In 2003, "Pink Prison" won the Venus Award as Best Scandinavian Film.

Later followed "HotMen CoolBoyz" (2000), produced under Zentropa's HotMale-banner and starring Ron Athey and Billy Herrington. AVN gave the film an exclusive AAAA½ Editors' Choice review, stating that "Moments after the video begins … the viewer comes to realize that this is no ordinary video tape", concluding that the film's director "has created true erotica". The film was nominated for five GayVN Awards including Best Foreign Release.

In early 2001, Puzzy Power's function was transferred to Innocent Pictures, with the objective of producing new quality adult films, while distributing and handling the three films already made by Puzzy Power and HotMale. In June 2003, following the filming of "All About Anna", Innocent Pictures became an independent company.

3. Innocent people

Before he became Innocent Pictures' CEO, Claus Sørensen was extensively involved in Denmark's commercial TV industry. In the early 1990s, among other things he took part in creating the commercial television network TvDanmark and in 1995 he co-created Denmark's Radio's popular TV game show "SuperChancen".

Following this, Claus Sørensen started the privately owned broadcast station TV2000, where in 1999 he became the first broadcaster to air explicit hardcore content on an uncoded public channel. This remains the hot and heated topic of much media debate. In 2000, working with Nicolas Barbano and Anders Petersen, Claus Sørensen expanded the channel's explicit programming to the web and television concept SexTv.dk, including such erotic shows as "Lysthuset" and "Marilyn", shown locally on TV2000 and streamed worldwide on the Internet.

In addition to the above, Claus Sørensen was responsible for the project DirectDemokracy@ndPublicAccess, broadcast live from Copenhagen's City Hall and the Danish Parliament.

Besides his extensive background in print and TV journalism, most recently as film critic for the daily newspaper Ekstra Bladet, Innocent Pictures' executive creative producer Nicolas Barbano holds a BA in film and media from the University of Copenhagen.

In 1989 he was involved in creating the long-running TV children's show "Troldspejlet" for Denmark's Radio and has, for a quarter of a century, been Denmark's most influential defender of non-mainstream cinema, including adult video. Thus, for the Danish National Encyclopedia he authored the first extensive entry on porno films published in a national encyclopedia anywhere in the world, and in 2000 he created and hosted the award-winning TV-show "Marilyn", also the first of its kind.

Among his books is the biography-collection "The World's 25 Hottest Adult Stars", published by high-end publisher Rosinante and named Year's Best Non-Fiction Book by the traditionally conservative newspaper Berlingske Tidende.

4. The Sex

Erotic, sexually explicit images and descriptions have long since become an accepted part of almost every other art form, including literature, sculpture, painting and photography. It seems logical that the next phase in this development must involve the art of motion picture entertainment. The artistic objective of Innocent Pictures is therefore to find a satisfying way of fully integrating erotic images of unsimulated sex into cinematic storytelling.

Technically speaking, the actors in our films will have real sex, and penetration will be shown. Use of gynaecological closeups, facial cumshots etc. however, will be avoided, so our films will fit into the so-called "XX" or "couples" classification, which will easily make them legal even in England and facilitate sales to most Pay-TV stations and hotel chains. All films will also be edited in softcore-versions (with no explicit images).

The sex should not be disturbing or harmful, but charming and attractive. Sex will not be combined with violence, the infliction of pain or physical harm. We will avoid sexual situations likely to encourage an interest in abusive sexual activity, any sexual activity which involves lack of consent, as well as any activity which is degrading or dehumanizing. And at all time should it emerge as an integrated part of the story and its character relations.

Our films will be appealing even to people who don't ususally like to watch sex videos, as well as fun and exciting to watch for both male and female audiences.

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