Romanian outfit Manifest Film boards Nataša Urban's horror-inflected motherhood drama 'Vagina Dentata' at Haugesund

Romanian production company Manifest Film has joined Nataša Urban's new feature Vagina Dentata as co-producer, with the project set to be pitched at the Nordic Co-Production Market in Haugesund this week, Variety reports.

The film is a surreal horror work following a 40-year-old artist, using darkly comic genre elements to probe the psychological pressures of motherhood and postnatal depression. Urban, an Oslo-based filmmaker, said the project grew out of the gap between cultural expectations surrounding motherhood and her own experience after becoming a parent.

Produced by Ingvil Giske through Norway's Medieoperatørene, Vagina Dentata is currently 60% financed, with most of the secured funding coming from the Norwegian Film Institute. The team is seeking additional co-production partners in France, Germany and/or Hungary, along with further financing, distribution and festival connections.

Manifest Film, an award-winning Bucharest-based company founded by producer Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, brings a Romanian connection that extends to the editing room. Dana Bunescu, the Romanian editor whose credits include 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, Child's Pose and Alexander Nanau's Oscar-nominated documentary Collective, is attached to cut the film.

The Nordic Co-Production Market — part of the New Nordic Films programme during the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund — has selected 21 projects this year. It is a marketplace where producers, financiers and distributors assess work-in-progress titles and decide what reaches cinema screens. Vagina Dentata stands among them, looking to close its remaining 40% of financing.

Urban's previous film, The Eclipse (2022), a 110-minute essay documentary confronting her country's wartime and criminal past, won top honours at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Her work has also been selected by IDFA in Amsterdam and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Giske produced The Eclipse through Medieoperatørene as well, making Vagina Dentata a second collaboration between the two.

What gives the project its distinctive edge is the meeting of European talent across borders: a Serbian-born, Oslo-based director, a Norwegian producer, a Romanian co-production house and one of Romania's most decorated editors — all converging on a film that uses the language of horror to address an experience that is, in Urban's telling, rarely portrayed honestly on screen. Whether that formula attracts the remaining partners and financing it needs is the question the Haugesund market exists to answer.