STOCKHOLM: Animal rights activists have accused a Swedish film company of animal cruelty in the production of a Swedish movie, “The Hundred-Year-Old Man”.

The film, due for release on Christmas day, is based on the bestselling book “The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared” by Jonas Jonasson which has sold six million copies in 35 countries.

British-based Animal Defenders International (ADI) claims two elephants were abused by their trainer during filming in Sweden. It released video footage of what it said was previous abuse by the same trainer in a British circus in 2009 to back up the allegation.

“We saw the animals being physically abused and also being kept in cage up to 11 hours a day, hit in the face with brooms and sustaining psychological abuse and very cruel training methods,” the group's spokeswoman Fleur Dawes told AFP, referring to the British footage.

“Sometimes the abuse of animals can remain hidden and they're not necessarily beaten on the set. It very much happens behind the scenes, when the animals are being trained, when the animals are being transported long distances,” she said.

The film company, Nice Drama, hired two elephants along with their German trainer via a Swedish circus, Cirkus Scott, which stopped using animals following Swedish media reports on the alleged abuse in October.

However the film's producer, Malte Forsell, who is behind several globally successful films including “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, said he was not aware of the scandal at the time of filming.

“I was quite shocked when I heard about this trainer,” he told AFP.

“From what I've seen they (the animals) were treated extremely well. Of course I am very much against the mistreatment of animals. It is very sad that the trainer has done these kind of things but when we were shooting everything was fine,” he said.

Forsell said that the animals were mainly filmed walking in a garden and that complicated scenes involving animals were added using digital effects.

In November, the US magazine Hollywood Reporter published a report into widescale animal cruelty in the film industry including on film sets monitored by the American Humane Association.