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Welcome to the fall 2014 edition of FILM with interviews, background and all the basics on upcoming Danish films.

The Look of Silence Joshua Oppenheimer revisits the Indonesian genocide from the victims' perspective.

VENICE + TORONTO

Silent Heart Bille August zooms in on a family of three generations gathering for an unusual weekend.

SAN SEBASTIAN

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

Itsi Bitsi Ole Christian Madsen's drama about Denmark's first real beat poet is, above all, a love story.

TORONTO

A Second Chance Susanne Bier's detective drama tackles intricate questions of right and wrong.

TORONTO + SAN SEBASTIAN

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

Stensgaard & von Trier VENICE. Editing Nymphomaniac was a novel experience for Molly Stensgaard. But then again, working with von Trier always is.

Films Should Be Demanding TORONTO. Icelandic director Hlynur Pรกlmason let his gut instinct take over in the making of his intense, black-and-white short Seven Boats.

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

Delicate Werewolf TORONTO. Tor Fruergaard has a soft spot for vulnerable men and monsters. His short film Growing Pains combines the two.

I want to BOOM! open it up AUSTIN. In The Absent One, Mikkel Nørgaard dramatically expands the universe of the two cold-case detectives Carl and Assad.

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

Extreme Spaces and People AUSTIN. Anders Morgenthaler draws on his own thoughts about life with or without children in I Am Here starring Kim Basinger.

Danish Film Catalogue FALL 2014

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

Meet DFI AT VENICE, TORONTO & SAN SEBASTIAN

Danish Film Screenings AT VENICE, TORONTO, AUSTIN & SAN SEBASTIAN

How to Co-produce WITH DENMARK

@danishfilm on twitter DK Film Institute: "A horror film about vicious beauty." New film by Nicolas Winding Refn 'The Neon Beauty,' out in 2016. http://t.co/6W4xcUsgNh about 2 days ago

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DFI-FILM | Digital issue

DK Film Institute: Zentropa's thriller 'The Absent One' reaches 619,000 admissions in local cinemas, leading 2014's DK charts so far. http://t.co/lQZcQIxzHF about 1 week ago

DK Film Institute: In the neighbourhood? Come see BLOOD TIES, about Svend and his 16 kids, Sunday at the Cinematheque. UK subtitles. http://t.co/NifW9sGXWM about 1 week ago

DK Film Institute: Ny analyse fra @NordiskFilmDK : Biograffilm skal hurtigere sĂŚttes til salg digitalt. #dkfilm http://t.co/nPdvZa0ATb about 2 weeks ago

DK Film Institute: New TV drama '1864' from Danish broadcaster DR (The Killing, Borgen) has been signed to air in the UK on BBC4. http://t.co/UJqcMab3H0 about 3 weeks ago

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

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FALL ISSUE 2014

Digital magazine DANISH FILM INSTITUTE

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The Look of Silence A young man vows to confront his brother's killers in Joshua Oppenheimer's follow-up to his chilling 2012 documentary.

VENICE + TORONTO FILM FESTIVALS

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Through Joshua Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discovers how their son was murdered – and the identity of the men who killed him. The family’s youngest son, Adi, asks how he can raise his children in a society where survivors are terrorized into silence, and

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

everybody is terrorized into treating the murderers as heroes. In search of answers, he decides to confront each of the surviving killers involved with his brother’s murder. And thus begins, through cinema, an unprecedented dialogue.

The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to his Oscarnominated The Act of Killing, revisits Indonesia’s dark history, this time telling the story from the victims’ perspective. Produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen for Final Cut for Real, who was also onboard Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking film from 2012, The Look of Silence is opening at Venice Film Festival and moving on to its North American premiere at Toronto.

Photos: Lars Skree

“As with The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer has not only provoked and exposed a politically and emotionally shattering situation through his work with striking and tragic characters, but found startlingly bold images with which to film it.

One are the optical lenses with which Adi fits his interviewees while asking them to tell their stories: Adi trained as, of all things, an optician, and as we see at the start of the film spends many of his working days travelling to old people’s homes and asking them about the past while testing their eyes.”

Nick Bradshaw

Holding a Mirror to Horror The Look of Silence sees Joshua Oppenheimer back in uncharted territory. While The Act of Killing took a surreal look at Indonesia’s genocide through the imagination of the killers, his follow-up tells the victims’ story through a young optician boldly confronting the men who killed his brother – and who are still in power.

By Nick Bradshaw

Last year, as The Act of Killing swept its way around the world, we were treated to a radical demonstration in the partialities, the pretences and the instabilities of history. Rarely has the word of the winners been shown up on film in such naked ugliness and ongoing mendacity. Finding, in a corner of the fourth most populous country in the world, that the poor were still too terrified and persecuted to speak out against ongoing exploitation, nearly half a century after an estimated minimum of a million suspected leftists had been slaughtered in a military-led purge, Joshua Oppenheimer instead trained his lens on the people who would speak freely: the now-aged perpetrators of those killings, who still rule the roost by boasting about their bloody triumphs, with the implication that they would and could repeat the feats if it were deemed necessary.

When Oppenheimer came across a group of former killers who were also movie mad, with ideas of their own about how to write history on screen, the square was circled. As Anwar and company let their mouths run and the cameras roll, they began to see themselves as we would begin to see them; the more layers of rationalisation, justification, dissimulation and unspeakable truth they wrapped around the film, the more there was to uncover. The resulting movie was traumatically eye-opening for just about everyone involved, http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-look-of-silence[07-11-2014 13:19:03]

DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

including most of us tied to such a country by trade and political alliance. And, of course, as much as the film exposed such a polity, it also challenged it.

I had the feeling there was another film to be made.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Before he left Indonesia for good (he no longer feels safe returning), Oppenheimer filmed a second movie; less than six months after accompanying The Act of Killing to the Oscars, he is ready to unveil The Look of Silence at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. As promised, this would be a counterpart to The Act of Killing, a film about the victimised families of the 1965 massacres to mirror the prior film about the perpetrators. He had conceived of the idea while editing The Act of Killing: “Especially in my longer original cut, almost every disturbing sequence ends in an abrupt cut to an almost silent landscape, usually with a lone figure. I had this feeling that every time we would make these abrupt shifts from Anwar’s dialogue scenes to these tableaux, we were also abruptly shifting the perspective of the film, creating these haunted spaces to honour and commemorate the absent dead.”

“And,” he continues, “I had the feeling there was another film to be made, equally contemporary, in which we enter those silent tableaux and imagine what it would be like to have to build a life here out of the rubble, to have to survive surrounded by these perpetrators who are still in power.”

As for finding a protagonist – someone brave enough to speak truth to Indonesian power; someone not content to suffer in silence with the label of “victim” – Oppenheimer had already met his man.

The Worm Turns Oppenheimer first came to Indonesia in 2001 to make The Globalisation Tapes , whose account of union struggles and free-market militarism introduced him to the fear that still shrouds the country. There was one name that always came up – ”as almost synonymous with the genocide, a kind of synecdoche for 1965.

I gradually came to understand the reason was that his death had witnesses.”

Like tens of thousands of others, Ramli had been abducted at night and taken down to Snake River to be killed and dispatched into the waters. But Ramli managed to escape, wounded; after a commotion in the road, he had crawled all the way back home to his parents, where his killers again found him; claiming that they would take him to hospital (and threatening otherwise to round up the rest of the family), they left him for dead at a nearby creek because it was nearing daybreak, only to be called back again by passersby who’d seen him struggling and calling for help. Finally, we’re told in another boastful confessional scene http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-look-of-silence[07-11-2014 13:19:03]

DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

which Oppenheimer had recorded long back in 2003, his killers cut off his penis and left him for dead in the plantation in which Oppenheimer filmed The Globalisation Tapes .

“Ramli,” says Oppenheimer, “was somehow irrefutable proof of the events that had traumatised everybody – that everybody knew about but that the regime at least officially had threatened everyone into pretending had not occurred. To talk about Ramli was almost to pinch yourself to remind yourself you’re awake; to remember the truth.”

Ramli’s parents, Rohani and Rukun, had one more child after Ramli died; we see Rohani reminding him that he was to be Ramli’s replacement, the only thing to save her sanity. Adi, as Oppenheimer tells it, grew up different from the others: surrounded by fear, but not afraid like his remaining elder siblings, who had all witnessed Ramli’s abduction and murder; burdened but empowered by his mother’s words; angry at the victim-blaming lies taught him in school, and now taught his children; determined to educate himself out of poverty; “questing” in his desire to understand what had really happened in 1965 and why.

I can’t think of another film in which a survivor of political violence, or a relative of a victim, confronts a perpetrator while the perpetrators are still in power.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Adi was one of the original contacts who suggested, in 2003, that Oppenheimer open his camera to the killers – and would help him find them, including the two who owned up to Ramli’s killing. And he would watch the resulting footage intently, even when Oppenheimer’s investigations took him away from the plantation villages to Medan and the gangsters who would become the focus of The Act of Killing. “He’d react with outrage, sadness,” says Oppenheimer. “I remember him saying, ‘This is the tiger that’s sleeping just under the floor in Indonesia’ – an image of repression, of something potent just under the surface.”

Come 2012 and Oppenheimer’s return to shoot his companion piece, it was Adi who suggested, rather than simply reprise their efforts to gather survivors on camera, that they film Adi meeting Ramli’s killers. Amir Hasan, the presiding executioner, had died since confessing for Oppenheimer’s camera in 2003, but they identified five who were still alive, able to talk and directly connected to the killings in Ramli’s village.

So just as The Act of Killing served as its own making-of, recording what happened as Anwar shot its scenes (“the method begets the story”, as Oppenheimer summarises), so The Look of Silence proceeds from its own making, with Adi watching Oppenheimer’s old footage in which killers confess, then paying them a visit.

It’s a narrative straight out of wish-fulfilment fiction – the return/revenge-of-the-repressed archetypes of High Plains Drifter, or The Bride Wore Black – and like almost nothing in factual cinema.

As Oppenheimer says, “I had this feeling we were entering totally uncharted waters. I can’t think of another film in which a survivor of political violence, or a relative of a victim, confronts a perpetrator while the perpetrators are still in power.”

All Asunder This unbroken ground was disorienting for everyone involved. Oppenheimer describes the precautions Adi, he and his producer Signe Byrge Sørensen took before each set-piece interview – taking no Indonesian crew and no ID other than mobile phones with only the numbers of their respective embassies stored; readying two getaway cars to mislead any would-be pursuers, and having their bags packed so they could all leave immediately for the airport. “They’re the ones who’ve committed crimes, but we were the ones seen as bandits,” he agrees.

As for Adi: “You just felt he was absolutely saying the unsayable, right to their faces,” says Oppenheimer.

“One way he’s able to get away with it of course is his own quiet and calm, his empathy and dignity.” At one point in the film he even hazards telling the leader of the Komando Aksi death squads, who is trying to back down from his earlier boasts, “I think you’re trying to avoid your moral responsibility.” In another confrontation, the head of the local legislature threatens: “If you keep making an issue of the past – it will definitely happen again.”

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

“What can I say – those were frightening moments,” says Oppenheimer. “I was often asked by audiences about The Act of Killing: wasn’t I afraid, shooting it? And really the only times were when the perpetrators themselves would doubt what they were doing. But in this one, getting to those moments was the crux of the movie. So yes, we were afraid.”

Yet if they feared for their footing, so too did their hosts. “As with The Act of Killing, one of the reasons perpetrators don’t want to look honestly at what they’ve done, and its meaning, is because they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves any more,” says Oppenheimer. “Also, of course, there’s a fear of revenge. And then, they were presumably confused: this man is speaking like a victim accusing us, but he’s with Joshua – and they knew me, and knew I’d been working with their commanders and other powerful perpetrators.

So what is happening here? I think that gave them second thoughts, if they were considering reacting violently in the moment. I had this feeling we were entering totally uncharted territory in these meetings, and they were astonished.”

What Lies Beneath As with The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer has not only provoked and exposed a politically and emotionally shattering situation through his work with striking and tragic characters, but found startlingly bold images with which to film it. One are the optical lenses with which Adi fits his interviewees while asking them to tell their stories: Adi trained as, of all things, an optician, and as we see at the start of the film spends many of his working days travelling to old people’s homes and asking them about the past while testing their eyes.

Magical realism is perhaps the only genre for dealing with atrocity in the context of total impunity. Because of the sorcery and magic that becomes inevitable when you have repression and horror.

Joshua Oppenheimer

Another visual motif is that of jumping beans, with which Adi’s children play, and which bookend the film.

Oppenheimer cites a couple of other favourite shots: light streaming through the clapboards of Adi’s parents’ house at night (“this sense of pressure, this energy inside”), and an overtaking motorbike carrying a burlap sack stuffed with live ducks, their heads hanging out and squawking (“a sense of contained energy, anguish, multitudes”).

The magic beans had reminded Oppenheimer of earlier thoughts, at the beginning of his Indonesian sojourn, of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude : “the massacre that just makes sense of everything you’d read up until the point that it’s spoken about; the vortex around which the

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

whole book swirls. Magical realism is perhaps the only genre for dealing with atrocity in the context of total impunity. Because of the sorcery and magic that becomes inevitable when you have repression and horror.

Because things haunt. Ghosts are abroad.”

After the Battle Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Indonesia’s genocide. Oppenheimer talks about The Act of Killing having helped open a space in which Indonesians could speak the truth about their history in public – though not one the government has yet made use of, beyond a cursory acknowledgement, prompted by the film’s Oscar nomination, that wrongs were done, though reconciliation will come when the government so chooses.

This film, he hopes, will help people make the most of that space: ”to have an easier time making a difference; to make the need for truth, and of reconciling the country to its past, something irrefutable among ordinary Indonesians, just as The Act of Killing was an object lesson in the need for justice, of the dangers of impunity and the moral vacuum to which total impunity leads.

“And what we see in Adi’s almost failed and tragic mission,” he adds, “is that that process is not going to come from one individual” – any more than it can be dictated from above. “There was a truth and reconciliation process in South Africa because the apartheid regime fell. There were the Nuremberg trials because the Nazis lost. That’s not going to happen in Indonesia until there’s real social change.”

Documentaries dealing with atrocities far too often tell us there’s going to be some truth commission, some campaigning humanrights advocates, and we can trust in them to put things right. I think the point is that nothing will be put right.

Joshua Oppenheimer

At the same time, the film’s aims are deeper than either advocacy or therapy: it is art before it is a tool.

“Documentaries dealing with atrocities far too often tell us there’s going to be some truth commission, some campaigning human-rights advocates, and we can trust in them, or in justice, or in the outrage of the audience, to put things right,” says Oppenheimer.

“I think the point is that nothing will be put right. You have to move on, but you can’t fix everything that’s been destroyed, all the opportunities, the hope and the lives lost. I hope this film leaves an indelible sense

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

that the damage done to the survivors’ families, to their lives, is irreversible, that nothing will wake the dead.”

The Look of Silence, opening at Venice Film Festival and moving on to its North American premiere at Toronto, is produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen for Final Cut for Real.

Nick Bradshaw is web editor for Sight & Sound, the BFI’s international film magazine.

The Look of Silence in Danish Film Catalogue

Joshua Oppenheimer

Director Joshua Oppenheimer, born 1974 in Texas, is based in Copenhagen and is behind award-winning films such as The Act of Killing (2012, Oscar-nominated), The Globalization Tapes (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998, winner of a Gold Hugo in Chicago), These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home (1996, winner of the Gold Spire in San Francisco), and numerous shorts.

Oppenheimer is Artistic Director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster in London. Educated at Harvard and Central St Martins, London.

The Look of Silence, a companion piece to The Act of Killing, is selected for the Venice and Toronto film festivals.

Photo: Daniel Bergeron

Signe Byrge Sørensen

The producer behind The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing has produced films since 1998 and founded her company Final Cut for Real in 2009.

Other films by Signe Byrge Sørensen include Cathedrals of Culture: Halden Prison (dir. Michael Madsen, 2014), The Human Scale (dir. Andreas M. Dalgaard, 2012), The Kid and the Clown (dir. Ida Grøn, 2011), and Football Is God (dir.

Ole Bendtzen, 2010). Signe Byrge Sørensen has also co-produced a string of international documentaries.

Signe Byrge Sørensen holds an MA in International Development Studies and Communication Studies and is a graduate of Eurodoc (2003) and EAVE (2010).

The Look of Silence in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

Danish Film Catalogue FALL 2014

Meet DFI AT VENICE, TORONTO & SAN SEBASTIAN

Danish Film Screenings AT VENICE, TORONTO, AUSTIN & SAN SEBASTIAN

How to Coproduce WITH DENMARK

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DFI-FILM | The Look of Silence

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DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

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FALL ISSUE 2014

Silent Heart

SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL

Bille August zooms in on a family during their last weekend together as they struggle with the matriarch's painful decision.

Three generations of a family have gathered at the matriarch’s house for the weekend. Terminally ill, she wants them to bid her a final farewell, having

http://www.dfi-film.dk/silent-heart-2[07-11-2014 13:19:29]

“I liked the idea of this family being together one last weekend, and in this weekend all the relationships

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

decided to end her life come Sunday. The sisters Sanne and Heidi have accepted her desire to die before her disease worsens. But as the weekend progresses, their mother’s decision becomes increasingly hard to deal with, and old conflicts bubble up.

Over the years, Bille August has signed a host of international co-productions, most recently Night Train to Lisbon (2013) with Jeremy Irons. Silent Heart marks August’s return to the intimate human drama of his Palme d’Or winners Pelle the Conqueror (1987) and The Best Intentions (1991).

Silent Heart, world premiering in the Official Selection at San Sebastian Film Festival, is produced by Jesper Morthorst for SF Film Production.

Photos: Rolf Konow

and conflicts become apparent because it’s this extremely awkward situation.”

“The issue of helping people who are suffering to die, for me it’s a question of dignity.

It’s a big debate in Denmark.

It’s this paradox, we own the right to live, but we don’t own the right to decide our own death. That belongs to the government. Because of modern medicine, we live much longer, but we live with diseases that can have us live a very painful life. It’s important to discuss. I hope the audience will reflect on it.”

Bille August

Following his Heart It is credit to Bille August’s skills as a veteran director that Silent Heart never feels maudlin despite its heart-tugging subject matter. Exploring the question of whether we have the right to arrange our own death, his new film is above all a universal story about family relationships.

By Wendy Mitchell

There are a lot of tears (on screen and likely in the audience) and complex emotions in telling the story of a family coming together for one last weekend before the ill matriarch ends her life. But Bille August’s new film Silent Heart never slips into easy sentimentality.

Bille August

Director Bille August, born 1948, trained as a cinematographer and photographer in Stockholm before attending the National Film School of Denmark, where he graduated in cinematography in 1973.

August’s international

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DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

“I hate it when films are patronising, especially with a subject matter like this,” says the 65-year-old director. “It’s a film full of emotion, but we wanted to avoid it becoming sentimental.”

August was impressed with Christian Torpe’s script when the producers at SF Film Production gave it to him, saying, “You are the only one who could direct this.”

Space for Interpretation

“I liked the idea of this family being together one last weekend, and in this weekend all the relationships and conflicts become apparent because it’s this extremely awkward situation,” August recalls. “You have a ticking clock in the story.”

In addition to being drawn to the themes and structure, he was impressed by the well-crafted script from Torpe, who is best known for writing TV projects such as Park Road and the award-winning Rita, whose lead Mille Dinesen in 2012 won a Golden Nymph at the Monte-Carlo TV festival.

“Torpe’s way of writing is so skillful,” August compliments.

“It was a great script, but it also had all these things in between the lines.

For a screenplay to be great, you need room for that. If it is all in the script, good actors can say, ‘But there’s nothing for me to do, it’s all there.’

You need that space for interpretation from the actors,” he says.

“Also, the audience wants that too, that’s what brings engagement – when they can fill in the holes.” August is always mindful of the audience. “They can feel it if you let them in. If you respect their feelings, you can make them involved,” he says. “It’s all about engagement.”

Indeed, the issue at the heart of Silent Heart provides many talking points for audiences.

“This issue of helping people who are suffering to die, for me it’s a question of dignity. It’s a big debate in Denmark. It’s this paradox, we own the right to live, but we don’t own the right to decide our own death. That belongs to the government. Because of modern medicine, we live much longer, but we live with diseases that can have us live a very painful life.

It’s important to discuss. I hope the audience will reflect on it.”

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breakthrough came with Pelle the Conqueror (1987), which received the Palme d’Or in Cannes and an Oscar and a Golden Globe. August received his second Palme d’Or in 1992 for The Best Intentions (1992), written by Ingmar Bergman.

Also among the director’s intimate human dramas are Jerusalem (1996), a Selma Lagerlöf adaptation, and A Song for Martin (2001).

Since the early ’90s Bille August has directed a string of big international co-productions, including The House of the Spirits (1993), Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997) and Goodbye Bafana (2007). His latest, Night Train to Lisbon (2013), premiered at the Berlinale.

Silent Heart is debuting at San Sebastian Film Festival.

Photo: Sam Emerson

Cast

Featuring as the family members in Silent Heart are a wide range of Danish actors – from seasoned players to upcoming names: Ghita Nørby / the mother Unrivaled as the great dame of Danish stage and screen, Nørby’s career stretches back almost 60 years and spans multiple genres. She has played everything from bucolic sweetheart to Machiavellian mother-in-law, but Nørby’s perhaps most memorable role is that of a spirited middle-aged wife in Waltzing Regitze (1989) directed by Kaspar Rostrup.

Cast against character in Lars

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

But it’s also important to note this isn’t just a film about death. “It’s a family story above all,” August says. Like all the films in his career, he adds. ”They are always about relationships.”

von Trier’s absurdly comic TVseries The Kingdom (1994 and 1997), she showed funny bones as a bitchy doctor. Up next for Nørby is the lead in Michael Noer’s feature Key House Mirror, out in 2015.

Morten Grunwald / the father

This issue of helping people who are suffering to die, for me it’s a question of dignity.

— Bille August

Working with the Actors

The other big draw to working on an intimate family drama in his native Denmark was the opportunity to work with some “great Danish actors,” he says.

Ghita Nørby, who worked with August on The Best Intentions in 1992, was his first call to play the mother, Esther, in Silent Heart. “She’s the queen of actresses in Denmark. She’s a strong woman, and she also has that warm, motherly feel,” August says of his leading lady. “You believe her as the head of the family.”

“I called her to talk about Silent Heart, and she said, ‘Whatever you want to do I’ll do it.”

Her stamina – she is now 79 – was jaw-droppingly impressive. She shot August’s film during the day and then was doing two plays in her evenings.

Although Grunwald commands considerable natural authority, he has enjoyed his greatest success in comedic roles, not least 14 turns as the proletarian loud-mouth Benny in the The Olsen Gang-movies. Several of Grunwald’s performances have drawn on his undeniable ability to muster a bossy, intimidating presence, but this has done little to dilute his reputation as one of the most towering funnymen of Danish cinema in the last half century.

Danica Curcic / the daughter Sanne Denmark’s Shooting Star at this year’s Berlinale has virtually overnight become one of the most sought-after young leading ladies in Danish cinema. In 2014, she takes the lead in no less than four films: On the Edge, The Absent One, Silent Heart and All Inclusive.

According to Danish film critic Morten Piil, some of Curcic’s primary traits are “flashes of temper and a powerful sensuality” as well as “exotic, enigmatic allure.” Born in Serbia, Curcic has lived in Denmark since age one Paprika Steen / the daughter Heidi Steen initially became known for her knack for the kind of ironic comedy which captured the zeitgeist of the ’90s. Within

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DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

The actresses playing her two very different daughters Heidi and Sanne are veteran Paprika Steen (“so present, and so totally right for this role” according to August) and impressive rising talent Danica Curcic (“absolutely amazing”).

Morten Grunwald plays the father, a retired doctor who loves his wife but also looks ahead to the future. Grunwald was more famous for his work 20 to 30 years ago, and August remembered him and chose him because “I wanted someone with an authority and who was believable as the head of the family.”

a few years, however, she would demonstrate a talent for dramatic roles – though more often than not, Steen would lace these with a mercurial wit and throw in a graceful aggression all her own. Her part in Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme triumph The Celebration (1998) serves as a fine example of that special Steen touch. Memorable roles from recent years include her abrasive, alcoholic actress in Applause (2009), feisty runaway wife in Superclásico (2011) and lustful sister-in-law in Love Is All You Need (2012).

Pilou Asbæk / Sanne’s boyfriend Dennis

As Sanne’s slacker boyfriend Dennis, Pilou Asbæk provides some muchneeded moments of levity – whether he’s wanting to smoke hash at inappropriate moments or telling awkward jokes. August says: “Dennis, he is the foreigner in this group, so you can identify with him.”

The location, a large family house on the island of Funen, serves as something of a character in itself. There are some beautiful, still atmospheric landscape shots interspersed in the film. But August is clear those aren’t just for beauty’s sake.

“The nature scenes are there to add to the feeling that this family is now together for this weekend, they can’t escape. No one could run away. It’s not something just to be beautiful, it’s more the feeling of isolation.”

Never Had Dinner Together

August has great respect for actors and actresses and says he

http://www.dfi-film.dk/silent-heart-2[07-11-2014 13:19:29]

Over the last few years, Asbæk has established himself as one of the most talented leading men of his generation in films like R, A Hijacking and Sex, Drugs & Taxation. Unafraid of taking on very demanding roles, Asbæk is an actor of considerable range, exuding great intensity on both the little and the large screen, and equally convincing whether he plays likeable or not-so-likeable characters. In the popular TVseries Borgen, he portrayed a spin doctor that falls somewhere between the two categories.

Silent Heart also features Vigga Bro, Jens Albinus and Oskar Sælan Kalskov in supporting roles.

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

understands their psyche even better having been married to two – previously Pernilla August and currently Sara-Marie Maltha.

Silent Heart in Danish Film Catalogue “When I work with actors, I don’t want to know too much about their private life. I don’t want to mix it up. I want to stay professional,” he explains.

Even though the cast was together on Funen for seven weeks, he didn’t encourage them to get too friendly away from shooting. “Actors are not necessarily friends outside the shooting. They want to hold on to that privacy,” August says. “When they are creating a scene, they are in a special room, and you should never interfere with that. You have to respect that room.”

“We never had dinner together at night,” he continues. “The work was so intense and focused and concentrated. We didn’t want to destroy that space. It was keeping the characters’ integrity.”

The nature scenes are there to add to the feeling that this family is now together for this weekend, they can’t escape.

— Bille August

He also protects the work by not doing rehearsals. “It takes away some spontaneity of situations. I don’t get how any director can rehearse. I want to save the moment for when the camera is there,” he cautions.

What the team did ahead of shooting was to meet for a week to do readings and go over the dialogue and discuss the characters’ backgrounds. “The actors become ambassadors for their characters,” he says. “I wanted to get them comfortable with their scenes. I don’t want big discussions on set.”

The mood on the set itself, despite the heavy subject matter, was calm.

“You can’t be tense all the time, but what I want is concentration. It’s important that you also relax. I want a calm shoot. But it has to be full of

http://www.dfi-film.dk/silent-heart-2[07-11-2014 13:19:29]

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

joy … It’s about creating an environment where great things can happen.”

You can see the strategy pay off in the film’s big emotional scenes or more commonplace, yet tender, moments: grandmother helping her grandson send a Facebook message to a girl he likes, the family sitting down for breakfast together, and – in a moment of more light relief – all of them smoking hash together.

Return to Denmark

Two of August’s most lauded films earlier in his career were also family dramas: 1992′s The Best Intentions, based on Ingmar Bergman’s script about the complex relationship of his parents; and 1987′s Pelle the Conqueror, about a Swedish father and son building a new life for themselves in Denmark around 1900.

Both films won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, and Pelle also won the Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

In recent decades August had been working more outside of Denmark – and indeed was living abroad in London for many years before returning to Copenhagen to make Marie Krøyer with SF Film Production in 2012. That project marked his first Danish film in nearly 25 years. He then made the big German-Swiss-Portuguese co-production Night Train to Lisbon.

Somewhat surprisingly, he doesn’t see many differences in making films at home in Denmark or abroad. “There’s no big difference making a film in the US or Italy or Germany or in Denmark,” August says. “It’s about finding

http://www.dfi-film.dk/silent-heart-2[07-11-2014 13:19:29]

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

great actors and a great crew.” Of course, with unionised crews in the US, that can lead to bigger crews, and “as soon as you have stars on the set, you get the entourage.”

There’s no big difference making a film in the US or Italy or Germany or in Denmark. It’s about finding great actors and a great crew.

— Bille August

But wherever he works, it’s always about “finding the right crew of people with the right attitude who understand what we’re doing and want to tell the same story.”

One major positive difference working in Denmark is the collaborative spirit, he says. “I like that a lot of Danish directors are friends. We are colleagues, not competitors. We read each other’s scripts and visit editing rooms. That’s very healthy and fruitful.”

Off to San Francisco

While he plans more Danish films in the future, August’s next project will be a US-German co-production to shoot in San Francisco. 55 Steps is based on the true story of a mentally ill woman who was mistreated in a hospital. She and her dynamic lawyer take on the American hospital system. In addition to telling the case story, August says the film is also very much about friendship. “It’s a beautiful story … It reminds me a bit of Erin Brockovich. It’s that same energy. Very powerful.”

Helena Bonham Carter will play the patient, Vera Farmiga her lawyer and John Goodman the lawyer’s associate. The film will shoot in October or November. “Travelling stimulates my curiosity, and I’m excited to shoot in San Francisco,” he says.

August also plans to work in TV again – The Best Intentions was a TV miniseries that was edited for a feature version. “TV is a great medium.

You have the time to expand your stories and go deeper into characters

http://www.dfi-film.dk/silent-heart-2[07-11-2014 13:19:29]

DFI-FILM | Silent Heart

and their interactions,” he says. “If you’re successful, you can reach an audience you can never reach with film.”

He says a US producer has offered him a TV project that he hopes to work on in 2015. But it’s also evident that cinema is his first love. He looks passionate talking about the “cinematic” nature of Silent Heart.

“It has to be cinematic. The key to all film work,” August says, “is finding the reality and making it believable … Creating life and emotions and at the end of the day engaging the audience.”

Silent Heart, world premiering as part of the Official Selection at San Sebastian Film Festival, is produced by Jesper Morthorst for SF Film Production.

Wendy Mitchell is editor for British film industry magazine Screen International.

Silent Heart in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM DIGITAL ISSUE IS PUBLISHED BY THE DANISH FILM INSTITUTE Editorial team Susanna Neimann Lars Fiil-Jensen Annemarie Hørsman Anders Budtz-Jørgensen

Editorial support Dorte R. Stidsing

Translations Glen Garner

Design Rasmus Koch Studio

Programming Rasmus Koch Studio Jan Fredslund

Danish Film Institute Gothersgade 55 DK-1123 Copenhagen K T +45 3374 3400 www.dfi.dk/english

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DFI-FILM | About

About the Danish Film Institute The Danish Film Institute (DFI) is Denmark’s national agency for film and cinema culture. We support the development, production and distribution of films and run the national archives.

The Danish Film Institute is a government body under the Ministry of Culture and operates in accordance with the Film Act of 1997.

What we do DFI allocates subsidies for the development, production and distribution of Danish films as well as international co-productions. Support programmes also include film education and international promotion. The DFI archives include a library, a stills & posters archive and a film archive, and the DFI also runs the Filmhouse open to the public, including the Cinematheque.

What kind of films do we support?

An important task of the DFI is to provide a framework for film funding which promotes diversity and riskwillingness in the industry. We do this by offering many gateways to production support, highlighting talent development and keeping a sharp eye on new digital platforms.

The DFI supports the production of 25 feature films and 25-30 documentary and short films every year. There are three kinds of support: the film commissioner scheme, the market scheme and the talent development scheme at New Danish Screen. Moreover, young directors may apply to the DFI Film Workshop which promotes experimental film art.

The DFI strongly encourages international partnerships and allows for seven to nine minor co-productions in feature film and four to six minor co-productions in documentary film per year.

A cornerstone of Danish film policy is to fund children and youth films to which 25 percent of all subsidies are allocated. See Children & Youth.

Danish Film Catalogue IDFA 2014

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DFI-FILM DIGITAL ISSUE is published by the Danish Film Institute

Press contact / Danish Film Institute Annemarie Hørsman Communication Officer +45 3374 3474 annemarieh@dfi.dk

Lars Fiil-Jensen Communication and Press Manager +45 2032 8121 larsf@dfi.dk

Press materials, photos for print, trailers et cetera: Danish Film Database

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Fall Issue 2014 August 2014

Cannes Issue 2014 May 2014

Berlin Issue 2014 February 2013

NDS 10 Years Issue 2014 January 2014

IDFA Issue 2013 November 2013

Fall Issue 2013 August 2013

Cannes Issue 2013 May 2013

Cartoon Issue 2013 March 2013

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DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

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Itsi Bitsi

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

Ole Christian Madsen introduces the spirit of Denmark's emerging hippie movement in a story about beat poet Eik Skaløe.

Based on actual events, the story begins in 1962, when Eik Skaløe meets the young peace activist Iben and falls head over heels in love. As Iben

http://www.dfi-film.dk/itsi-bitsi[07-11-2014 13:20:26]

“Despite the fact that this is Madsen’s most restless movie to date, with its characters bouncing all over Europe and

DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

refuses to commit herself to one man only, Eik desperately tries to win her over. Unfolding over the next years in Denmark, France, Spain, North Africa, Greece and Iraq, the film follows the young poet, writer and singer as he finally recognizes his defeat and in 1968 travels to the land of dreams, Nepal – a journey from which he would never return.

Asia, Itsi Bitsi shares numerous qualities with its predecessors.

The source of tension in Madsen’s movies is almost always loss, usually involving the collapse of a world the protagonist previously saw as permanent, intractable.

When things implode, the Ole Christian Madsen introduces two young protagonist is inevitably actors, Joachim Fjelstrup and Marie Tourell Søderberg, as Eik and Iben in his tragic love story caught unawares, and left to deal with a world where he or of the ’60s. Itsi Bitsi is Madsen’s fifth feature to she can see the same screen at Toronto Film Festival and is selected for reference points, but they no the Contemporary World Cinema programme. The longer point in the same film is produced by Lars Bredo Rahbek for Nimbus direction as before.”

Film.

Photos: Per Arnesen and Nikola Predović

Steve Gravestock

A Place to Fall Apart Itsi Bitsi is a portrait of a generation and a wickedly amusing glimpse of Danish rock history. But above all, it’s a love story, says Toronto’s longtime film programmer Steve Gravestock, who has followed Ole Christian Madsen from the very beginning. Despite their dizzying array of subjects, Madsen’s movies are all linked, he says.

By Steve Gravestock

There are directors who find their subject and their way of addressing it immediately and stick to it through thick and thin, seldom varying even when they run the risk of self-parody.

Then there are filmmakers, far rarer and far more interesting at least from http://www.dfi-film.dk/itsi-bitsi[07-11-2014 13:20:26]

Ole Christian Madsen

Director Ole Christian Madsen, born 1966, graduated in direction from the National Film School of Denmark in 1993, the same year as Thomas Vinterberg and Per Fly. Madsen enjoyed success with his short fiction Sinan’s Wedding (1997) and debuted as feature director with Pizza King (1999). Madsen contributed to

DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

my perspective, who explore what interests them and devise an approach to the subject which fits it and reflects the milieu. Intriguingly, while these filmmakers create a body of work which shows a far wider range of seemingly conflicting interests, they paradoxically sketch a far more coherent world view, because what eventually links the films is not stylistic tics or generic crutches, but the directors’ sensibilities, reflected in how they view an issue or milieu and locate the conflicts and tensions within it.

Veteran Danish filmmaker Ole Christian Madsen belongs in the latter, far more rewarding group. His feature film output has run the gamut ranging from near magic-realist romantic comedies (his Oscar-shortlisted Superclásico) to war movies (one of Denmark’s biggest domestic hits, Flame & Citron); from haunting portraits of fading, troubled relationships (Prague and Kira’s Reason – A Love Story) to grimy explorations of the underworld (his first feature Pizza King and his third Angels in Fast Motion).

Dogme 95 with Kira’s Reason – A Love Story (2001), followed

by Angels in Fast Motion (2005), Prague (2006), the historical drama Flame & Citron (2008) and the Oscarshortlisted comedy Superclásico (2011).

Madsen is an acclaimed director for the small screen, including the series Taxi (1997) and Unit 1 (2000) as well as the six-part post-war noir The Spider (2000). He has also directed several episodes of the US action-drama series Banshee (2013-).

Itsi Bitsi is world premiering at Toronto Film Festival.

Photo: Robin Skjoldborg

It’s a hallmark of Madsen’s approach that his narratives don’t move forward, but laterally or even backwards.

— Steve Gravestock

Madsen’s latest Itsi Bitsi, based on the real life story of the founder of Steppeulvene, one of the most revered Danish rock bands of the 1960s, addresses the continent-spanning romance of Eik, a frustrated activistturned-novelist-turned-rock star, and Iben, the enigmatic love of his life.

The film introduces its two principals at a protest against nuclear armament. Iben is in a relationship with a hard-core activist, but is immediately taken with Eik’s iconoclasm and his poetic, less rhetorical approach to issues. The arrival of drugs and records (most notably Bob Dylan’s early stuff) only accelerates their departure from the political movement, and soon enough the pair is tooling through Southern Europe heading God knows where. En route, Iben drops in and out of the relationship, sometimes inviting new people to be a part of it, sometimes disappearing for months on end.

Throughout, Eik remains committed, though his rambling, florid writings never seem to be progressing despite months of drug-fuelled hard work in

http://www.dfi-film.dk/itsi-bitsi[07-11-2014 13:20:26]

Feature Films / At a Glance

Superclásico (2011) Madsen’s first stab at the comedy genre is set in Buenos Aires, a fitting arena for a love triangle involving football, tango and wine. The film follows the frustrated wine salesman Christian (Anders W. Berthelsen) who travels halfway around the world to reconcile with his wife Anna (Paprika Steen) who has fallen for a hot Argentinian football player.

Oscar-shortlisted for Best Foreign Language film.

Screened at Toronto.

See more in the Danish Film Database Flame & Citron (2008) Madsen’s story about a duo of legendary WWII resistance fighters, played by Thure

DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

the most exotic places. When Iben disappears in the north of Denmark, Eik decides the only way to win her back is to become famous. In one of the film’s finest set pieces, he feeds an already prominent folk musician, who oozes earnestness, a copious amount of drugs in order to convince him to combine forces.

Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen, was a huge box office draw.

The film follows the two outsiders, nicknamed Flame (for his red hair) and Citron (who worked at a Citröen car repair shop), charged with liquidating Danish informers. But when Flame is asked to execute his girlfriend Ketty, an enigmatic courier played by Stine Stengade, he starts questioning his orders. Screened at Toronto.

See more in the Danish Film Database Prague (2006)

Despite the fact that this is Madsen’s most restless movie to date, with its characters bouncing all over Europe and Asia, Itsi Bitsi shares numerous qualities with its predecessors. The source of tension in Madsen’s movies is almost always loss, usually involving the collapse of a world the protagonist previously saw as permanent, intractable. When things implode, the protagonist is inevitably caught unawares and left to deal with a world where he or she can see the same reference points, but they no longer point in the same direction as before.

More often than not, the collapse is something that’s been long gestating, and the hero has simply been too complacent or rigid to realize it. In Prague, for instance, alienated Christoffer travels to the Czech Republic to claim his estranged father’s remains where he finds out that his father was gay (the reason he left the family) and that his marriage is effectively over.

The most extreme and the sole comic instance in Madsen’s films comes in Superclásico, where wine salesman Christian realizes the repercussions of his wife’s departure months afterwards. At the most macrocosmic, the heroes of the resistance film Flame & Citron, who would have been outcasts in peacetime, must deal with a Denmark overrun by Nazis while struggling to function in a resistance movement whose objectives are conflicted or even in direct opposition to theirs. And, in Itsi Bitsi, Eik crisscrosses countries and continents – he hits virtually every small town in Denmark – in his haphazard, at times indirect attempts to win Iben back, all the while willfully ignoring her reluctance.

Mads Mikkelsen and Stine Stengade join forces as the couple Christoffer and Maja who go to Prague to bring back the remains of Christoffer’s deceased father.

Christoffer harbors deep resentment toward his dad who left him and his family years ago. While he is slowly learning more about his father’s life, Maja breaks the news that she has fallen for someone else.

Finally, Christoffer’s emotions come to a head as he realizes that his family is no longer.

Screened at Toronto.

See more in the Danish Film Database Angels in Fast Motion (2005) Set in a world dominated by hard drugs and desperate addicts, Madsen’s adaptation of Jakob Ejersbo’s novel tells the tale of three lost souls: the dealer Maria, the former addict Allan and the prophetic cynic Steso. All are struggling for survival and trying to make sense of the madness.

See more in the Danish Film

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DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

Database

In Itsi Bitsi, a map of Eik’s directionless travels would read like a cartographer’s portrait of delirium.

— Steve Gravestock

It’s a hallmark of Madsen’s approach that his narratives don’t move forward, but laterally or even backwards, with the characters’ slow-burn comprehension equally or even more important than any action. Prague’s Christoffer finds out he knew his father even less than he thought he did, and the same could be said about his relationship with his wife.

Superclásico’s Christian thinks he’s taking his life into his own hands, but in reality he’s vainly trying to turn back the clock. In Flame & Citron, the two fighters aren’t simply the doggedly individualistic rebels of myth – they’re constantly being jerked around: by the higher ups in the Londonbased resistance or by the woman Flame has fallen in love with. And finally, in Itsi Bitsi, a map of Eik’s directionless travels would read like a cartographer’s portrait of delirium.

Of course, these thematic concerns would be interesting but dry if Madsen and his collaborators weren’t capable of communicating the emotional investments his characters have in their increasingly doomed, imaginary status quos. I’ve been remiss about the importance of the actors in Madsen’s work. Every film boasts fine performances – frequently with the style shifting from one film to the next – including Mads Mikkelsen’s work in Prague and Flame & Citron, whose world-weary, rigid Christoffer seems lifetimes away from his damaged resistance fighter Citron, Thure Lindhardt’s borderline psychotic Flame, and particularly Stine Stengade in Prague and the femme fatale in Flame & Citron. The two newcomers in Itsi Bitsi, Joachim Fjelstrup and Marie Tourell Søderberg, both deliver memorable turns, while veteran performers Ola Rapace (I Am Yours and Beyond) and Thure Lindhardt offer up key supporting roles.

Kira’s Reason – A Love Story (2001) Madsen’s contribution to Dogme 95 stars Stine Stengade as Kira who, after two years in a psychiatric ward, struggles to deal with life in the real world.

The lavish surprise “welcome home” party that her husband has planned for her does little to ease her fears. Kira’s sole desire is to return to normality, but is forced to realize that she cannot be the wife and mother she used to be. Screened at Toronto.

See more in the Danish Film Database Pizza King (1999) Madsen’s first feature film is set among a group of young second-generation immigrants who get mixed up with Copenhagen’s crime scene.

Young Junes is tired of selling hot goods to fences, and he feels he is being pushed into his best friend Bobby’s dangerous plans. As a conflict of loyalties arises, Junes meets the law student Fatima who inspires him to re-examine his life of petty crime.

See more in the Danish Film Database

Steppeulvene

Steppeulvene was a Danish rock band which despite its short-lived existence has become the icon for Denmark’s hippie music scene of the ’60s. The group was the result of a collaboration between lead singer Eik Skaløe, http://www.dfi-film.dk/itsi-bitsi[07-11-2014 13:20:26]

DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

I doubt there’s anything quite as plaintive in recent cinema as Thure Lindhardt’s Flame and his belief that he might be able to lead a normal life with the femme fatale who may have sold him and Citron out more than once, or Anders W. Berthelsen’s wine salesman Christian and his buffoonish attempt to beat his ex’s new superstar boyfriend at football, or Mads Mikkelsen’s Christoffer and his solitary walk through the streets of Prague, dragging his suitcase over the cobblestones, headed nowhere we can imagine, in that film’s conclusion – well along with the bookending images in Isti Bitsi, with Joachim Fjelstrup’s Eik charging wild-eyed, in no apparent direction, through the deserts of Afghanistan.

Eik adores chaos, as long as he has an anchor, and when he loses that, chaos is far less appealing.

Denmark’s first real beat poet, and Stig Møller (guitar, vocal), who wrote the psychedelic, folkinspired music. The other members were Søren Seirup (bass) and Preben Devantier (drums).

“Itsi Bitsi” was Skaløe’s nickname for Iben as well as the title of a legendary song on the group’s trailblazing record from 1967, Hip. The group’s name was taken from the 1927 novel Der Steppenwolf by the GermanSwiss author Hermann Hesse.

Also in the late ’60s, the North American band Steppenwolf named itself after the novel, equally inspired by its antiauthoritarianism and commitment to the discovery of the self.

— Steve Gravestock

Itsi Bitsi in Danish Film Catalogue

Indeed, much of Itsi Bitsi is about the adrenalin generated by collapse.

Things fall apart, characters become junkies and lose their way, but, really until the last section of the film, Eik is practically gleeful, optimistic, willing to duke it out with an army of suitors and gurus who want to haul Iben away from him. It’s only in the latter stages when reality sinks in that he begins to doubt himself. In his own way, he’s as rigid as his predecessors in Prague, Flame & Citron and Superclásico, the only difference being that the others feared or ignored change; here Eik adores chaos as long as he has an anchor, and when he loses that, chaos is far less appealing.

A meditation on a characteristic theme of loss and realization, Itsi Bitsi is

http://www.dfi-film.dk/itsi-bitsi[07-11-2014 13:20:26]

DFI-FILM | Itsi Bitsi

one of the most unique entries in Madsen’s work. The film is, at different times, a portrait of a generation, a wickedly amusing glimpse of Danish rock history and, most of all, a compelling romance.

Itsi Bitsi, world premiering in the Contemporary World Cinema programme at Toronto Film Festival, is produced by Lars Bredo Rahbek for Nimbus Film.

Steve Gravestock is a senior programmer at Toronto International Film Festival.

Itsi Bitsi in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

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A Second Chance

TORONTO + SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVALS

Susanne Bier tackles intricate moral questions in her drama starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a cop thrown off balance.

Detectives and best friends Andreas and Simon are leading vastly different lives. Andreas has settled down with his wife and son while Simon,

http://www.dfi-film.dk/a-second-chance-2[07-11-2014 13:20:55]

“The film is about a cop who kidnaps a baby. Now that’s what’s interesting. He breaks every rule. Sure, you can

DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

recently divorced, spends most of his waking hours getting drunk. But all that changes when the two of them are called out to a domestic dispute between a junkie couple. It all looks very routine – until Andreas finds the couple’s infant son, crying in a closet. The usually collected policeman is shaken to his core. As Andreas slowly loses his grip on justice, it suddenly becomes up to the unruly Simon to restore the balance between right and wrong.

make a film about someone who breaks all the rules and you don’t understand him.

What’s exciting is making a film about someone who does something so wrong, but nevertheless you understand him.”

“If people thought my films were proper and nice and predictable, I would rather open a bakery or write a After triumphing at the Oscars with her global cookbook. That’s not why I drama In a Better World (2010), Susanne Bier make films. It’s brutal and turned to romantic comedy in Love Is All You Need demanding work, and it’s fun (2012). Bier’s US feature Serena is expected to because you lie awake at release later this year. night thinking about it. It should satisfy your creative curiosity and provoke you.

A Second Chance, celebrating its world premiere That’s why you do it.”

at Toronto Film Festival and its European premiere at San Sebastian, is produced by Sisse Graum Susanne Bier Jørgensen for Zentropa.

Photos: Rolf Konow

What Is a Good Person?

Susanne Bier asks some big questions in her new film, A Second Chance, a dark drama about a police detective who does all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

The Oscar-winning director talks about crossing boundaries, the right to interfere in other people’s lives and how films can be emotional explorations.

Susanne Bier

By Christian Monggaard

Director Susanne Bier, born 1960, graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1987.

Susanne Bier beams. She’s happy. The Danish director has two new

Bier won the Best Foreign

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

features coming out soon: Serena, a period drama starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and A Second Chance, a dark, Danishlanguage tale with a cast including Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Ulrich Thomsen, Maria Bonnevie and supermodel Lykke May Andersen.

A Second Chance is the reason why I’m sitting across from Bier in an office in Filmbyen, the former military site outside Copenhagen that’s home to her production company, Zentropa.

A Second Chance is a harsh thriller drama about a police detective, Andreas (Coster-Waldau), and his wife Anne (Bonnevie), who have recently had a much-wanted baby. We are also introduced to Tristan (Lie Kaas), a violent career criminal and drug addict who has just had a baby with his girlfriend Sanne (May Andersen), though they clearly don’t know how to care for a child. Ultimately, Bier says, the film is about navigating your own and others’ destinies.

Language Oscar with In a Better World (2010), which also fetched a Golden Globe and opened to rave reviews and top box office.

Over the years Bier’s name has been firmly established with titles such as the Dogme film Open Hearts (2002), Brothers (2004) and the Oscarnominated After the Wedding (2006). Her first US production came with Things We Lost in the Fire (2007), and expected to release later this year is her period drama Serena. Bier turned to comedy in 2012 with Love Is All You Need.

A Second Chance is selected for the festivals in Toronto and San Sebastian.

Breaking All the Rules

Photo: Les Kaner

Like most of Bier’s films, A Second Chance takes up the kind of personal and moral themes we all ponder: What is a good mother? When can a person do something he shouldn’t, and still be a good person?

Editor Pernille Bech Christensen

But it’s a hard film for the director to talk about because it includes a number of twists she doesn’t want to spoil. ”I can say, though, that the film is about a cop who kidnaps a baby,” she says.

The interesting thing about Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is that he’s tremendously attractive, convincing and heartfelt, but then he has this other side, his Game of Thrones side.

— Susanne Bier

“Now that’s what’s interesting. He breaks every rule. Sure, you can make a film about someone who breaks all the rules and you don’t understand

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A Second Chance is the thirteenth film Susanne Bier has made with editor Pernille Bech Christensen, their partnership going back to Bier’s first film, Freud Leaving Home (1991).

There are two particularly good reasons for that, the director says.

“Pernille has a kind of BS detector that enables her to tell if something is believable or not. You can’t fool her. I may not agree with her, but I know why she’s saying what she’s saying. Also, she’s extremely musical. There’s music in everything she does. That cocktail makes her the superb editor that she is.”

Pernille Bech Christensen also

DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

him. What’s exciting is making a film about someone who does something so wrong, but nevertheless you understand him. I want the audience to hope he will succeed at something we all know he shouldn’t be doing.”

Where Do You Draw the Line?

A Second Chance is the sixth film Bier has developed with writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, who also wrote the script. They previously made the Dogme film Open Hearts (2002), Brothers (2004), the Oscarnominated After the Wedding (2006), the Oscar-winning In a Better World (2010) and, most recently, the romantic dramedy Love Is All You Need (2012), starring Trine Dyrholm and Pierce Brosnan.

Bier and Jensen have worked closely together for so many years that they have a running dialogue about things that interest them and possible subjects for future films. A Second Chance comes out of that dialogue and their mutual desire to do something more brutal than the romance of Love Is All You Need.

“One of the things we have in common is a strange obsession, a moral obsession – it could almost be religious, but it isn’t – with where to draw the line,” Bier says.

“What’s right and what’s wrong? We can easily spend a whole night discussing that. But it’s not like we said, ‘Let’s make something now that’s more brutal than anything we did before.’ It was not anything cerebral, more like a physical desire for us to do something more violent. A kind of restlessness in both of us which manifested itself in the way we both, at this point in our lives, wanted to be working with something that’s a bit

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edited Kristian Levring’s Cannes participant The Salvation.

A Second Chance in Danish Film Catalogue

DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

more transgressive. There are no career considerations in it. It’s pure curiosity and a wish to explore.”

Images of Human Situations

At the end of the day, A Second Chance is about the wish to change other people’s lives and what right you have to do that. That’s a big question, Bier acknowledges. Even if it sounds a bit abstract, it’s still relevant and interesting in an everyday sense, because it’s so crucial in most people’s lives.

“It’s something you start thinking about when you have kids and you suddenly have to answer things and concretely relate to those kinds of questions,” Bier says.

In films you can illuminate moral issues emotionally. Films aren’t words. Films are images. And for me, that means images of humans and human situations.

— Susanne Bier

“Why is it you can’t take candy in the supermarket when it’s just lying there? Anyone could do it, but most don’t. These are quite basic things and I wanted to investigate them. Film is good for that, because it’s such an emotional medium. In films you can illuminate moral issues emotionally.

Films aren’t words. Films are images. And for me, that means images of humans and human situations.”

All the Way

Bier says Anders Thomas Jensen was surprised at how brutal A Second Chance was when he saw the finished film for the first time.

“When I work, I dedicate myself to the film completely and it turns out the way I think it should be. I felt this story had to be told in a very

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

uncompromising way for it to make sense. Sugar coating it would make it irrelevant. Even with everything that happens to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s character Andreas, at the end of the day you’re still interested in him – you’re still really compelled by him, and I don’t think you would be if the story had been softer. It’s his story, his journey, and if you start compromising on that, you lose him and the film becomes irrelevant.”

That’s the worst thing that could happen, the director says. She fights to make films that audiences react to and think about.

“If people thought my films were proper and nice and predictable, I would rather open a bakery or write a cookbook. That’s not why I make films. It’s brutal and demanding work, and it’s fun because you lie awake at night thinking about it. It should satisfy your creative curiosity and provoke you.

That’s why you do it. You do it because you can’t not do it. Sure, A Second Chance may go too far, but at least I did what I could to make it right. It’s only fun if it’s a little bit nerve-racking. It might not succeed, but you have to be able to forgive yourself if it fails. And you can only do that if you take it exactly as far as you can with an honest heart.” She pauses.

“It doesn’t have to be about anything moral, but it should make an impression. Isn’t that what you want out of a film? That’s what films can do: give us violent emotional and physical experiences.”

You Have to Be Brutally Honest

For the same reason, Bier doesn’t read what film critics and others write about her. It would only be a distraction if she started seeing herself through the eyes of others.

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

“You can’t organise your life around whether other people think you’re a success or a failure. I have to have a compass in my gut and follow it,” she says. That doesn’t mean Bier doesn’t listen to other people. On the contrary, she encourages her closest collaborators to tell her if they disagree or if there’s something they don’t understand.

You can’t organise your life around whether other people think you’re a success or a failure. I have to have a compass in my gut and follow it.

— Susanne Bier

“I thrive on a certain amount of pushback. No one thrives with too much or the wrong kind of pushback, that’s frustrating and uncreative. But if the pushback is constructive, I love it. I welcome discussion, including on the set. Often, the sound guy will grab hold of me and say, ‘I think that line is nonsense,’ or ‘I don’t understand what’s going on in this scene.’ And I take that very seriously, because I know the sound guy is only doing it because he wants everything to be as good as possible. That sometimes forces me to articulate something I otherwise wouldn’t have articulated.”

Likewise, she and Anders Thomas Jensen have an unspoken agreement to be honest with each other – brutally honest – when they are working on a script.

“It’s a bit unsparing, but loyal and fun. We trust each other and it’s really no problem.”

Explosive Energy

Every role in a film should be distinctively cast, the director contends. In A Second Chance even the smallest parts are filled with some of Denmark’s and Sweden’s most able and popular actors. Even so, with the three male leads played by such a powerful trio as Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Ulrich Thomsen, is there a concern that they might overshadow each other?

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

“I don’t think so,” Bier says. “On the contrary, I think they infect each other with more energy and provoke each other in a good way. I never thought you should make sure the roles don’t outshine each other. Quite the opposite. There’s a unique space between Coster-Waldau and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who plays the career criminal Tristan, that becomes enormously explosive. It becomes very obvious, because their characters don’t like each other.”

In general, casting a film is an exciting process. For Bier, it’s about finding the right actors but also thinking outside the box a little bit.

“Lykke May never made a film before,” Bier says, “and I never worked with Coster-Waldau before. It’s been ten years since he last had a lead role in a Danish film. The interesting thing about him is that he’s tremendously attractive, convincing and heartfelt, but then he has this other side, his Game of Thrones side, where you don’t really know what to think of him.”

“That cocktail was perfect for A Second Chance. It wouldn’t have worked if he was just handsome. But there’s that other side to him, as well.”

A Second Chance, celebrating its world premiere in the Special Presentations programme at Toronto Film Festival and its European premiere in the Official Selection at San Sebastian, is produced by Sisse Graum Jørgensen for Zentropa.

Christian Monggaard is a film critic at the Danish daily Information.

A Second Chance in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM | A Second Chance

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DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

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FALL ISSUE 2014

25. August 2014

Stensgaard & von Trier

By Peter Knegt VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Editing Nymphomaniac was a novel experience for Molly Malene Stensgaard. But then again, working with Lars von Trier always is, she explains to Peter Knegt, as Director's Cut Volume Two hits the big screen in Venice, completing von Trier's erotic epic.

Nymphomaniac is the ninth project that Molly Malene Stensgaard has edited for Lars von Trier – or the ninth and the tenth, if you consider the fact that it’s been released as two separate volumes. Each of those volumes has also been released in two different versions, a shorter cut and a Director’s Cut, all of which Stensgaard oversaw the editing process.

It was the Director’s Cut that Stensgaard and von Trier initially constructed, the second volume of which is debuting at Venice Film Festival. This will in a sense culminate the external narrative of Nymphomaniac, which has slowly been released around the world in its various volumes and cuts since last December.

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Nymphomaniac Director’s Cut. Photos: Christian Geisnæs & Zentropa

DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

Here Stensgaard talks about her collaboration with Denmark’s arguably most singular auteur and their mammoth undertaking to create a sense of unity in a film that stretches five-and-halfhours, with a story spanning 50 years and using multiple narrative layers.

Q: How did you and Lars von Trier first start working together?

I started working with him by coincidence right after I graduated from the National Film School of Denmark as an editor in 1993. I was working as a co-editor on the first part of Lars von Trier’s TV series The Kingdom. It kind of started from that, and we’ve been working consistently ever since, except for Breaking the Waves and Antichrist.

I think that there is a trust that we share, a trust that has been developed through the years, of course. But basically, there was trust from the very beginning. I was very new, and I wasn’t expecting to go right into a collaboration like this with a director like that.

Q: What do you think is the key to your working relationship’s longevity? Beyond trust, at least?

First of all, I think we share a sense of humour and have a lot of fun. And secondly, I think that Lars trusts my selection of the actors’ performance very much. That is the strongest base that we have – that we do agree a lot about the performances when we see them.

Sometimes, when I look at the early work that I did with him, I can see that at that time it was like 80% intuition. That’s changed during the years, but I think for me it’s like a life-long second film school that’s been going on – because there are

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Molly Malene Stensgaard

Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard, born 1966, graduated in film editing from the National Film School of Denmark in 1993.

Stensgaard is widely recognized for her work for Lars von Trier, their collaboration starting right after her graduation as she came onboard as co-editor on part 1 of von Trier’s TV cult classic The Kingdom (1994). Since then she has worked on all of von Trier’s feature films (with the exception of Breaking the Waves and Antichrist) – including The Idiots (1998) Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), The Boss of It All (2006), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013).

Other collaborations include Annette K. Olesen’s One to One (2006), Katrine Wiedemann’s A Caretaker’s Tale (2012) and Daniel Joseph Borgman’s The Weight of Elephants (2013). Among her upcoming editing credits are Omar Shargawi’s Middle East drama Medina and Christina Rosendahl’s political thriller The Idealist, both out in 2015.

Stensgaard has also a string of documentaries under her belt.

From 2006 to 2010 Stensgaard was feature film commissioner at the Danish Film Institute, where she was responsible for green-lighting numerous titles.

Co-editors on Nymphomaniac “To work on a film like that demands coeditors that you really trust. Luckily I had that,” says Molly Malene Stensgaard, who was assisted throughout the process

by Morten Højbjerg, Jacob Schulsinger and Per Sandholt.

DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

elements in storytelling and film in general that he’s just so extremely advanced in. So it’s possible to learn constantly from him.

Q: What about von Trier stands out for you, in terms of the collaboration between editor and director?

I think what might be surprising for many people is that Lars is not a dictator when you work with him. I think that in general experienced directors are very good at describing the vision they want and giving you an overall idea of where this boat is headed. As a result, Lars really expects the key workers around him to contribute with their own ideas and solutions. So he’s very much not on your back constantly pointing out what you should do.

I think that’s very surprising to a lot of people. They think that the better you are as a director, the more in control you are. But one of the great things about Lars is that he dares to give up control during the process so that he gets something back. That’s also from the actors, the DOP … all the way around. Of course Lars knows that we will make changes and develop the film until he’s happy – but he also knows that he will get offers and suggestions when he works like this.

Q: I’d think that’s really the way it should be.

It should. And I think with a film like Nymphomaniac for instance, you have to surrender to the fact that you don’t know everything at a certain point. Otherwise, you don’t actually get the gifts that the process should bring through the film, right?

Q: Absolutely … How did von Trier actually approach you with Nymphomaniac? Did you know initially that it would essentially mean you’d have to cut four different films? And how did that work exactly?

We knew from the beginning that there would be various

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Nymphomaniac

“Provocative”, “preposterous”, “funny” and “utterly fascinating” … International critics were generally intrigued by Lars von Trier’s erotic epic when it opened in its shorter, theatrical four-hour version last year in December.

Running five-and-a-half hours, Nymphomaniac Director’s Cut is, just like the shorter version, released as two separate volumes. Volume One world premiered at the Berlinale, and Volume Two is opening at Venice Film Festival.

The story of Nymphomaniac charts the development of a woman’s sexuality from childhood to middle age. When we first meet the protagonist, Joe, she is found beaten in a dark alley by a bookish bachelor, Seligman. He takes her home and tends to her wounds, while she takes inventory of her extreme sex life.

Spanning eight chapters, the film recounts Joe’s experiences in a story rich in associations and interspersed events.

At the heart of the film are three actors: Charlotte Gainsbourg as Joe, Stacy Martin as young Joe, and Stellan Skarsgaard as Seligman.

Both the shorter and the Director’s Cut version are produced by Louise Vesth for Zentropa.

Lars von Trier

Director Lars von Trier, born 1956, graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 1983. He was co-founder of Zentropa and one of the four original “brothers” behind the Dogme 95 manifesto. Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or and the best actress award (Björk) in Cannes. Antichrist and Melancholia also took home the awards for best actress (Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst, respectively).

DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

versions. But we didn’t really work with that. We worked with one film, and that’s the film that is Lars’ version, the Director’s Cut. Then, after we’d worked with that for eight months, we used a month to do the shorter version. So it wasn’t really like trying to do different versions at once. We just did one film – a film that we really liked. A long film with a break, basically.

Q: How do you go about structuring a film so long and complex as an editor? That must be a very intense and challenging process.

You just have to start somewhere. I think that with Lars’ films they are quite often close to the script, structure-wise. It’s not like with other films and other directors I’ve worked with where you do a lot of structuring in the editing process, shifting scenes around and mixing it up a lot. But with Lars’ films, which are often so complex and complicated, there isn’t a lot of shifting around to do.

I think with Nymphomaniac a challenge was that we wanted the film to have different styles throughout – and also have them look extremely different. How to achieve that, we just had to discover as we went along.

Q: And how did that work, exactly?

We did a first cut of Volume One, and then Lars and I kept working on that while my co-editors started on a rough cut of Volume Two. So when Lars and I were done with Volume One, we moved on to what they had worked on. That’s not how we normally work. Normally we do all the materials at once, and if I have co-editors, they work from my selection. But Lars and I could see with this project that it was just so enormous.

Working like that was quite exciting for us – to discover just how fresh we were able to stay if we didn’t dive into all the details all the way through. So, that process was actually good for us.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be finished yet, and we would have died on the way … Of course, to work like that demands co-editors that you really trust. Luckily I had that.

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Lars von Trier’s Film Family Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard is one of Lars von Trier’s many long-time collaborators behind the camera, which also include assistant director Anders Refn, visual effects supervisor Peter Hjort, sound designer Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen, production designer Simone Grau Roney and costume designer Manon Rasmussen.

Since Melancholia, the film family has expanded to include director of photography Manuel Alberto Claro, story supervisor Vinca Wiedemann and producer Louise Vesth.

DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

Q: What were some of the specific challenges that came up working this way?

I think that there were really three things to figure out with Nymphomaniac. One was how the framed story with Seligman and Joe in the apartment would work. I was quite surprised about how strong those scenes remained. It was basically just two people talking in a room. And enormous amounts of dialogue! But during the process we could see that this particular part of the film was a very strong element in itself.

So I think that was one thing, to try to figure out how that would work – how often should Seligman and Joe turn up, how long should they be present and when. Also, when would it just be a concentrated, intimate scene between them, and when was it to be disturbed by these digressions that we worked with. And that was the second thing that was important for us to discover how to get right – how to structure all these digressions through the archive clips and graphics in the image.

The third thing was that all the chapters should look different.

The challenge was how we could work up a film that looked so extremely different all the way through and still make sure in the end that there was some sort of unity to it … So those were the three elements that we tried to work with – besides the characters and the story, of course.

There was a lot of discovery throughout, but there always is with Lars’ films. In this case it just took longer to be wiser about how we were going to do things.

Q: Beyond Lars von Trier, this process obviously includes collaborations with various post-production teams – sound, visual effects, music. How did you work with them?

I think one of the great things with Lars is that he’s very loyal with the people he works with. And there are a lot of benefits to long-term working relationships, a lot of things you don’t have to figure out. You have a working language that’s been developed through the years. That’s not only the case with myself and Lars in the post-production. It’s also the case with the sound designer

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DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen and the visual effects supervisor Peter Hjorth. We have a long-term working relationship as well. I think what’s quite unusual is that we work so simultaneously, especially Kristian and I. He started working with the sound basically from the beginning of the editing. So there are a lot of talks and discussions trying things out, which is very productive and constructive, I think. It’s a very interesting collaboration. I really enjoyed it.

The other thing on this film is that I had one co-editor, Morten Højbjerg, who I always work with. He was with me all the way through, and it was really nice to have someone else to discuss ideas with. And then there were two extra co-editors to go through the cut with us. So there was a period where I wasn’t editing that much myself. It was more like running between the different rooms in order to get to this first rough cut that Lars and I could work on. In that sense, it was a lot of trying to make the process run as smoothly as possible, and also making sure it fitted what was best for Lars. He was also, of course, a bit exhausted after the shooting. So we did try constantly to evaluate how to do things to make it work for all of us. And that was quite a task with this film because it was so large.

Q: With the Directors’ Cut of Volume Two about to be released, how do you suspect audiences familiar with the initially released shorter version will react?

I think they will know the difference. Much more so than with respect to the shorter and longer versions of Volume One. It is just much more obvious because with Volume Two there are some very distinct scenes and sequences that you don’t find in the shorter version.

Audiences will see that there is one new sequence in particular, and I think that sequence is one of the strongest discussions between Seligman and Joe in the whole film. In that sense I think they will concede the Director’s Cut version of Volume Two as deeper and more rough.

Volume Two of Nymphomaniac Director’s Cut is world premiering Out of Competition at Venice Film Festival. Volume One premiered earlier this year at the Berlinale. Both the shorter

http://www.dfi-film.dk/nymphomaniac-long[07-11-2014 13:21:14]

DFI-FILM | Stensgaard & von Trier

and the Director’s Cut version are produced by Louise Vesth for Zentropa.

Peter Knegt is a contributing editor and writer for the independent film news site Indiewire.

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FALL ISSUE 2014

25. August 2014

Films Should Be Demanding

By Marianne Lentz TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

The last thing Hlynur Pálmason wants is to talk down to the audience. The Icelandic director, who graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2013, thinks films should be demanding because life is demanding.

Seven Boats is on the bill for Toronto's international short film programme.

Seven Boats. Photos: Maria Von Hausswolff

A man in a fishing boat at sea against a distant black and white horizon. Sounds of splashing and heavy, laboured breathing. A slow pan reveals another boat and two fishermen pulling a net out of the water. The splashing sounds return. Someone is gasping for air. A cliff towers, and a new boat appears in the frame.

Hlynur Pálmason That’s the opening sequence of Hlynur Pálmason’s Seven Boats, which at 9 minutes 53 seconds takes its sweet time telling its compact story in a few simple moves. The patiently panning camera reveals more boats. As the film unfolds, the chilling http://www.dfi-film.dk/seven-boats-2[07-11-2014 13:21:33]

Director Hlynur Pálmason, born 1984 in Iceland, moved to Denmark in 2009 and graduated from the National Film School

premise is laid bare: a man is in the water, wreckage from his sunken craft floating around him. He is surrounded by fishing boats, but no one helps him out of the icy water. On the contrary, when he gets too close, a fisherman pokes him with an oar.

of Denmark in 2013 with the wellreceived A Painter, a film about an egocentric artist whose carefully crafted universe is ruptured by the unexpected visit of his son. Pálmason is currently working on his first feature film. His short Seven Boats screens at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.

Only toward the end of the film do we actually see the man. Until then, his desperate breathing, the sound of exhausted swimming and the fishermen’s reactions are the only evidence we get that a person is being left in the lurch.

Photo: Frederik Strunk

Seven Boats / Director’s Note

I could picture the whole thing. I knew exactly how it would go and where to shoot it, because it’s in me, this place.

— Hlynur Pálmason

“In 1667, a Dutch ship carrying a load of gold bullion and a crew of 200 men sank near the coast of Iceland. Back then, it was the custom for villagers to comb the shore for washed-up wreckage. But this time was different. When the locals came down to the shore, they found a lone survivor, a dark-skinned man. They had never seen a person of colour before, and in their ignorance, taking him for the devil or a demon, they killed him.”

Pálmason is hard pressed to say exactly how the idea for the film emerged. He grew up on the coast outside the small Icelandic hamlet of Höfn, where Seven Boats was shot, and he fished with a net when he was younger. One of the film’s fishermen is played by his father-in-law. Obviously, the 29-yearold director is on intimate terms with the country and the culture, and the idea for the film had been simmering in his head for years.

“While Seven Boats isn’t about that story, it’s inspired by the event to create suspense and tension through the framing and sound rather than through the narrative. I’m interested in the essence of that specific situation and its details.”

“I could picture the whole thing. I knew exactly how it would go and where to shoot it, because it’s in me, this place,” he says, referring to the coastline outside of Höfn. He wrote the whole story in a matter of minutes.

Icelandic Directors in Denmark

Hlynur Pálmason

The Nordic nations have traditionally been close partners in the area of film, and that’s also true for Denmark and Iceland.

“It was like an unconscious pot boiling over.”

Trusting Your Gut

Pálmason made a stir last year with A Painter, his graduation film from the National Film School of Denmark. The film, about a

http://www.dfi-film.dk/seven-boats-2[07-11-2014 13:21:33]

Over the last 10-15 years, Iceland has fostered a new generation of notable filmmakers. Several have had their films produced and funded in Denmark and several, like Hlynur Pálmason, are products of the Danish National Film School. Here is a short outline of three directors with Icelandic-Danish films in the

DFI-FILM | Films Should Be Demanding

self-absorbed artist who gets a visit from his neglected teenage son, was praised for its originality and subtle satire. Still, his first few years in film school were not easy.

“The instructors didn’t get what I wanted to do. They thought it was too weird and different, and they didn’t believe in it at first.” But around the halfway mark, they started to see where he was going.

“They could tell that I wasn’t trying to provoke in any way. After all, the way you make films reflects your temperament. One of the most important things a film should have, I think, is temperament … It should reflect the way you look at things – it should be personal,” the director says.

Overall, Pálmason is highly intuitive in his filmmaking. In the process, he lets his gut instinct take over and just follows it.

“I am confident that, if it works for me, it will work for the audience,” he says. Following his gut, he stripped Seven Boats of dialogue and colour.

Films as Physical Experiences

“I wanted to get rid of language. I wanted the film to be one that everyone could watch and get the same experience from. I tried adding dialogue, but the film lost focus. It went from experience to too much information. When you add language, the brain starts looking for connections, and I wasn’t interested in that.”

pipeline: Dagur Kári will soon be releasing his fourth feature, Fúsi. After graduating from the National Film School of Denmark in 1999, Kári had big success with his debut feature Nói Albinói (2003). His Dark Horse (2005) world premiered at Cannes, after which Kári embarked on the US production The Good Heart (2009). Kári is one of the directors behind the Nordic filmmaking collective Creative Alliance, which also numbers Thomas Vinterberg, Lone Scherfig, Per Fly, Janus Metz and Ole Christian Madsen.

Rúnar Rúnarsson, who took his debut feature Volcano to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes 2011, is preparing his second feature, Sparrows, set in Iceland’s spectacular Westfjords. By the time he graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2009, Rúnarsson had already received an Oscar nomination for his short film The Last Farm (2004), and his two award-winning student films 2Birds (2008) and Anna (2009) had both screened at Cannes.

Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson graduated in fine arts from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2006 but quickly moved into filmmaking. In 2013, he received a Special Mention at Cannes for his short film Whale Valley, produced with support from the Danish Film Institute.

Guðmundsson has spent spring and summer at the Cannes Festival’s Résidence programme in Paris developing his first feature Heartstone, a story set in Iceland to commence shooting next summer.

Seven Boats in Danish Film Catalogue

I wanted to give the audience a sensation of getting seasick or dizzy.

— Hlynur Pálmason

For Pálmason, Seven Boats is not an Icelandic story but a universal one. Above all, it should give the audience an http://www.dfi-film.dk/seven-boats-2[07-11-2014 13:21:33]

DFI-FILM | Films Should Be Demanding

experience, preferably a physical one.

“I wanted to give the audience a sensation of getting seasick or dizzy. The best thing about cinema is that it’s a dark room with a big picture and loudspeakers – then it’s up to you how you want to use it.”

With that power comes responsibility, Pálmason says. A filmmaker should not be afraid to challenge his audience. We don’t know why the man is in the water or why the fishermen aren’t helping him out. In fact, the absence of an explanation is one of Pálmason’s points.

“Film is a very powerful medium: it can provoke the audience or make them happy, but it can also make you feel like you’re being talked down to. If the story is over-told, for instance. Then I always think: Is there a place for me in this? Why am I spending time on this when it asks nothing of me? Films should be demanding because life is demanding,” he says.

Pálmason likewise gives a wide berth to anything smacking of morals or messages.

“It’s important that the audience gets space to experience something. I don’t want to dictate what they should feel or think.”

Seven Boats, selected for the Short Cuts International programme at Toronto Film Festival, is produced by Julie Waltersdorph Hansen, Anton Máni Svansson and Per Damgaard Hansen for Masterplan Pictures.

Marianne Lentz is a writer and freelance journalist.

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DFI-FILM | Delicate Werewolf

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FALL ISSUE 2014

25. August 2014

Delicate Werewolf

By Marianne Lentz TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL

Animation director Tor Fruergaard has a soft spot for vulnerable men and monsters.

Growing Pains, selected for Toronto's international shorts programme, combines the two in the story of a teenage boy who undergoes a horrific transformation whenever the lovely Felicia is near.

Tor Fruergaard remembers his teenage years as thoroughly overwhelming.

“This whole thing about getting hair everywhere and growing and getting zits and a weird voice – you really go through a transformation, and I remember it as pretty horrible,” the 34year-old director of the animated Growing Pains says.

The film introduces us to Fabian, a shy, introverted teen who

http://www.dfi-film.dk/growing-pains2[07-11-2014 13:21:52]

Growing Pains. Photos: Anders Nydam

DFI-FILM | Delicate Werewolf

lives in the country with his domineering veterinarian mother.

One day Felicia, a streetwise big-city girl, shows up at the clinic with her daffy dog, and Fabian loses his heart. While his sexscared mother sets about castrating the dog to “relieve it of its frustrations,” Fabian and Felicia strike up a teenage romance.

There’s just one little snag: every time Fabian gets excited, he turns into a werewolf.

Images of Manhood

“We use the werewolf as an image of male sexuality,” Fruergaard says in a nod to his screenwriter, Sissel Dalsgaard Thomsen. As in Venus, Fruergaard’s graduation film from the National Film School of Denmark, which had a couple tentatively entering a swingers’ club to jump-start their sex life, sexuality is a central theme in Growing Pains.

Tor Fruergaard

Director Tor Fruergaard, born 1980, graduated from the National Film School of Denmark in 2010 with the muchacclaimed Venus, a claymation short set mainly in a swingers’ club.

Staying in the same ballpark thematically, Growing Pains (2014) is an animated short about a boy who turns into a werewolf when he’s sexually aroused.

The film screens at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.

Photo: Sara Lubich

“There’s a certain shame associated with having this aggression in your body and not knowing what to do about it,” Fruergaard says, referring to puberty with its physical changes and roaring sexuality.

“Everyone goes through a period when they are enormously vulnerable – about what others think about them, how they look, that kind of thing.”

The male protagonists of my films are not particularly macho. They are sensitive guys who get sad and show their feelings.

— Tor Fruergaard

It was important for Fruergaard to have his protagonist, Fabian, be a cautious, vulnerable, type – a recurring feature of many of his films.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/growing-pains2[07-11-2014 13:21:52]

Outbreak!

Werewolves used to be a rare sight in Danish films, but now at least two young Danish filmmakers have harnessed the metaphorical power of these supernatural creatures. In addition to Tor Fruergaard’s Growing Pains, in which the werewolf creates an image of sexual transformation, Jonas Alexander Arnby’s 2014 Cannes participant When Animals Dream uses the werewolf as an expression of the animal instincts of a young woman struggling with her dawning sexuality and hostile surroundings.

Not only werewolves but monsters, vampires and superheroes are showing up more frequently in Danish films these days. Keep your eyes peeled for the next releases in the genre, Martin Barnewitz’s Danny’s Doomsday and Ask Hasselbalch’s Antboy: Revenge of the Red Fury. See the catalogue below for more information.

DFI-FILM | Delicate Werewolf

“The male protagonists of my films are not particularly macho.

They are sensitive guys who get sad and show their feelings. I think it’s super important to show some alternative images of manhood,” the director says. A sensitive child himself, he adds, “I was a real cry-baby.”

As a young man, he found himself in the punk scene in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, a pairing of the wild and the vulnerable that pops up in his films.

“I think it’s exciting to insert vulnerable people into a rough environment,” he says.

A World of Paper

The film’s world is made of paper – from the characters, which are painted on paper, to the props and tissue-paper backdrops.

While most other animated films are made on the computer, everything in Growing Pains was first given life in physical reality.

“We made everything in the real world, lit it and used stop motion. I love keeping things out of the computer for as long as possible. Cutting and painting cardboard is a lot more fun than doing it in Photoshop,” says Fruergaard, who has been drawing ever since he could hold a pencil.

Also, he wanted to create a world with a singular look.

“I have made a restriction not to work in 3D. Accordingly, everything I do has an analogue look. Surfaces and textures have brushstrokes and fingerprints, so you can tell they were made by human hands, not a computer brush.”

Cutting and painting cardboard is a lot more fun than doing it in Photoshop. http://www.dfi-film.dk/growing-pains2[07-11-2014 13:21:52]

Growing Pains in Danish Film Catalogue

DFI-FILM | Delicate Werewolf — Tor Fruergaard

The overall goal for Fruergaard and his crew was to make a film that stands apart from the typical cartoons with their shrill Mickey Mouse voices and black and white characterizations. The director takes some inspiration from the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and his richly nuanced characters.

“It’s important that the film is believable, that we believe in the characters. There’s no doubt, for instance, that the movie’s ‘villain’ is the mother, but we didn’t want to portray her as consistently evil. In reality, like all mothers, she wants what’s best for her child. Her project is just completely mistaken.”

Growing Pains, selected for the Short Cuts International programme at Toronto Film Festival, is produced by Nynne Marie Selin Eidnes for First Lady Film .

Marianne Lentz is a writer and freelance journalist.

Growing Pains in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

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FALL ISSUE 2014

25. August 2014

I want to BOOM! open it up

By Wendy Mitchell AUSTIN FANTASTIC FEST

In The Absent One, his second contribution to Zentropa's Department Q franchise, Mikkel Nørgaard dramatically expands the universe of the two cold-case detectives, crafting an intricate mystery involving the murder 20 years ago of two teenagers near a forbidding boarding school.

The Absent One. Photos: Christian Geisnæs

The Keeper of Lost Causes easily led the Danish box office for 2013, with a whopping 721,000 admissions. For comparison, that was more than double the numbers for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. In fact, Mikkel Nørgaard’s thriller is the third most popular Danish film over the past 10 years.

Mikkel Nørgaard

So you might think the pressure was great for the next film in Zentropa’s Department Q franchise, The Absent One.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-absent-one[07-11-2014 13:22:14]

Director Mikkel Nørgaard, born 1974, graduated in direction from the National

DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

Yet the director had already finished shooting the second film before the first film was released. He had no idea if he was following a flop or a hit, but he did know the pressure was on to deliver a bigger story this time around.

“The novel behind it is much bigger in scope. It goes into a totally new environment compared to the first one,” Nørgaard explains of The Absent One‘s source novel by the same name, Jussi Adler-Olsen’s second book in the series about two detectives solving cold cases. “That was one of the things I really enjoyed about doing this one. I knew with this film we could really open up the universe and bring that big scope to it.”

Film School of Denmark in 2001. He has directed a number of TV series, including the highly popular Clown (2004-2009), a raunchy comedy about the two comedians Frank and Casper.

The series was made into the feature film Klown (2010), Nørgaard’s debut on the silver screen. The film reached skyhigh box-office numbers in Denmark and received awards at Austin Fantastic Fest and the Montreal Fantasia film festival.

The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013) world premiered at Locarno Film Festival.

Nørgaard’s second film in the Carl Mørck detective series, The Absent One, is premiering at Austin Fantastic Fest.

Photo: Isak Hoffmeyer

Power, Violence and Sex

Indeed, the film’s scale and scope wouldn’t feel out of place in Hollywood – although the storytelling thankfully retains its Nordic sensibilities. The film is a grander, more expansive production than The Keeper of Lost Causes.

That was all to serve the story, the director notes. “We had so many locations, so many sets and big builds. For a Danish film, it’s quite something,” he says proudly. For sure, it does feel more ambitious than many European titles.

It’s not just the sets that are bigger. The second film also explores greater, more complicated themes. “It looks into the relationship between power, violence and sex,” Nørgaard says.

There is something fascinating about boarding schools, something mystical. It’s this closed environment with its own rules that attracts me.

— Mikkel Nørgaard

http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-absent-one[07-11-2014 13:22:14]

The Absent One The Absent One is Zentropa’s second big screen adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s crime novels about the notoriously gnarly detective Carl Mørck and his assistant Assad specialising in unsolved murder cases: Two young twins who are found brutally murdered in a summer cottage in 1994. A number of clues point in the direction of a group of young upper-class students from a nearby boarding school, but the case is closed as a local outsider pleads guilty and is convicted for the murders. When the case ends up on detective Carl Mørck’s desk 20 years later, he soon realises that something is terribly wrong.

As Carl and his assistant Assad start their investigation, they discover an old emergency call from a girl who seems to know the truth behind the murders. Soon they are plunged into an intense search for the girl, Kimmie, who has been missing since then.

The Absent One in Danish Film Catalogue

DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

The Absent One follows Department Q’s quirky duo of detectives, Carl and Assad, re-opening the case of two teenagers who were brutally murdered in 1994. The trail leads them to several people who were elite boarding school students at the time, and who have powerful roles in society now.

“There is something fascinating about boarding schools, something mystical,” Nørgaard says, adding that he didn’t attend one himself. “It’s this closed environment with its own rules that attracts me. When all of the most powerful people have grown up together and have each others’ back, their secrets are shoved under the table.”

Complex Storylines

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s source novel for The Keeper of Lost Causes had presented a more straightforward story – as Carl and Assad were trying to find a kidnapped woman held in a bunker.

Adler-Olsen’s plot for his second book about the two detectives, on the other hand, presented a more complex mix of crimes, timelines and interconnecting characters.

“With this one, there were so many storylines we had to take care of,” Nørgaard says. “We had to get the right balance and have all these stories come together as a whole.”

Mixing up the chronology on screen, like Adler-Olsen does in the novel, was also important to him. There are jumps in time from the kids’ boarding school days to their adult lives now. “We wanted the film to evolve the way the novel does. There are some clues in the boarding school story. We wanted to keep that tension – what happened back then? What made these people what they are today?” he explains.

Nikolaj Arcel, the director of A Royal Affair, was the screenwriter for The Keeper of Lost Causes, and he returned to write the script for The Absent One, this time with his frequent collaborator Rasmus Heisterberg. “I have to pay my compliments to these guys. It’s so difficult to get all these stories together, and they did a great job,” the director says.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-absent-one[07-11-2014 13:22:14]

DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

A Cinematic Approach

“We knew from the beginning we wanted this second film to have a much greater scale and scope and make it a really cinematic.

We knew that if we could pull it off it would give the film so much more value to have all these environments,” says Nørgaard. In addition to a grand estate and the luxurious boarding school, another striking location was a designer house on the north coast above Copenhagen.

Our first film was claustrophobic going ‘in, in, in’ and this one is going ‘out, out, out.

— Mikkel Nørgaard

The Absent One, again produced by Louise Vesth for Zentropa, shot for a total of ten weeks, five in Denmark and five in Germany (mostly in Hamburg).

“Our first film was claustrophobic going ‘in, in, in’ and this one is going ‘out, out, out,’” he says.

His instruction to his team was this, Nørgaard recalls: “I want us to bring the best of the first one – the charm and the characters and the storytelling – but then I want to BOOM! open it up!” Changing the cinematography style and lighting also helped, the director adds: “It’s much more colourful, more open.”

Remarkably, the budget of around five million euros is about the same as the first one, but it looks much bigger. “Working with the same crew, we know each other, and we really spend our money well. We make sure all of it shows up on screen,” Nørgaard says.

Pushing the Characters

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DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

In addition to reuniting the crew, the film of course brings back Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Fares Fares as Carl and Assad. Their relationship adds a familiar centre to the film and some trademark moments of dark humour.

“It was great working with them on the first film, but they know their characters much better now. They feel safe, so they would come to me and challenge me on the scripts and fight for their character. The relationship between them is growing, and I think you can see that in the film,” Nørgaard says. “They wanted to push their performances, taking them to the next level. And that’s one of the best things about going back to the same characters – that chance to explore them in new ways. I think Nikolaj and Fares both took that opportunity.”

The younger actors are also particularly notable for their ability to handle some very tough (and sometimes violent) scenes. It also helps that they were older (ages 19-22) than the youngsters they were playing. ”Some of the scenes are so violent that of course it could influence them. We talked a lot about it, and we stayed together in the same hotel so we could process the things we were doing together. That was great for all of us.”

There were also preparatory workshops and bonding time at a summer house before the shoot started.

The first ten days of the film’s production were spent doing the boarding school scenes in Germany. “It was almost making a film inside a film,” the director remembers.

A number of new actors joined the project, too, including David Dencik, Pilou Asbæk – and Danica Curcic, who plays arguably the toughest role as Kimmie, a woman so traumatised by the past that she is unable to function in society today. Promoted at the Berlinale 2014 under the Shooting Star label, young Curcic looks unrecognizable from her more glamorous role in Christian E. Christiansen’s On The Edge, released earlier this year.

“I thought Danica was a little young for the role, but she has something that is unique. She has access to her emotions, she’s so brave. She can go all in and just BE in a situation. We worked a lot with makeup and hair to make her look older.”

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DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

Fun and Games Up Next

After two such heavy films, Nørgaard is next up for some muchdeserved clowning around.

“This is the right time to take a break and have fun,” he says, smiling. Because of that timing, he won’t direct the third Department Q film, which will see screenwriter on the first two installments, Nikolaj Arcel, taking the director’s chair.

Nørgaard is working on a sequel to his debut film Klown, a comedy featuring the dynamic duo of Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen that proved a national blockbuster hit in 2010.

We had so many locations, so many sets and big builds. For a Danish film, it’s quite something.

— Mikkel Nørgaard

Shooting starts in Denmark and the US in October, as the two characters, appropriately named Frank and Casper, hit Los Angeles. The trio – Nørgaard, Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen – are currently working on the script.

“The budget is a little more than the first Klown film, but not that much. It’s a very small crew and a very special way of shooting.

That’s what I really like about it. I take it as seriously as The Absent One, but it’s such a different way of shooting,” he says.

“The relationship between Casper, Frank and myself is something special, and we should hang on to that.”

“For me it’s very privileged that I can do films as cinematic and big-spectrum as The Absent One and then have the opportunity to work in a totally different manner – more playful and having fun and improvising with a small crew. I don’t think either world is better. They’re just very different.”

http://www.dfi-film.dk/the-absent-one[07-11-2014 13:22:14]

DFI-FILM | I want to BOOM! open it up

He sees both films as important in his career. “I think sometimes in Denmark, we have this division, ‘this is arthouse and this is mainstream.’ I always kind of hated that. Why do you have to do that? Can’t it just be a film, a good film?”

Whether it’s silly fun with the Klown crew or exposing the dark heart of society with the Department Q films, Nørgaard is happy the audience is along for the ride. “I feel very privileged that an audience wants to go see the stories I want to tell. I’m grateful for that.”

The Absent One, celebrating its world premiere at Austin Fantastic Fest, is produced by Louise Vesth for Zentropa.

Wendy Mitchell is editor for British film industry magazine Screen International.

The Absent One in Danish Film Catalogue

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DFI-FILM | Extreme Spaces and People

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FALL ISSUE 2014

25. August 2014

Extreme Spaces and People

By Jonas Varsted Kirkegaard AUSTIN FANTASTIC FEST

There is more than chills to director Anders Morgenthaler's thriller-drama I Am Here, starring Kim Basinger. Unpredictable and unafraid to offend, the director in his new film tackles involuntary childlessness, drawing heavily on his own thoughts about life with and without children.

Anders Morgenthaler, 41, is a multi-layered, one-of-a-kind figure in Danish cinema. His films deal with “extreme spaces and extreme people,” as he said a few years ago. Taking stock of his filmography, it’s hard to disagree. From his latest film, the thrillerdrama I Am Here, all the way back to his hard-hitting debut feature Princess, which screened at Cannes, you get the sense of a fiery temperament whose indignation and compassion, especially where children are concerned, are among his most prominent traits.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/i-am-here-2[07-11-2014 13:22:36]

I Am Here. Photos: Christian Geisnæs

Anders Morgenthaler

Director Anders Morgenthaler, born 1972, graduated in interactive design from Design School Kolding in 1998.

DFI-FILM | Extreme Spaces and People

I Am Here is about parents and children – although, crucially, children this time are present by being absent. The film tells the story of Maria, a successful, middle-aged career woman, played

by Kim Basinger, who desperately wants a child. Told that she is unable to conceive and learning that there are babies languishing in a prostitution network near the German-Czech border, Maria tries to bribe her way to get one. To make her greatest wish come true, Maria must navigate an underworld of exploitation and brutality.

A Magnificent Specimen

Describing his pre-parenthood days as “both fantastic and tragic,” the director says being the father of two daughters really intensifies everything. In I Am Here, he draws on his own

He moved on to the animation programme at the National Film School of Denmark, where he graduated in 2002 with Araki – The Killing of a Japanese Photographer (2002), which screened in Berlin and Cannes.

Morgenthaler made his feature debut with Princess (2006), praised for its unique visual style and no-nonsense approach to controversial subjects. Princess was chosen for Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

After his second feature, the live-action drama Echo (2007), he returned to animation in his third, the family film The Apple and the Worm (2009). I Am Here premieres at Austin Fantastic Fest.

Photo: P. Wessel

thoughts and feelings about life with and without children.

I Am Here

I wanted to tell the story of Maria, an Amazon of a woman who is missing that final piece of the puzzle which life is denying her.

— Anders Morgenthaler

“What if they hadn’t come?” he says. “What if I were unable to have children? Would life be worth living? What if I couldn’t stop thinking that having children was the last missing component that would complete me as a human being? This is why I wanted to make I Am Here. I wanted to tell the story of Maria, a magnificent specimen of the human race. An Amazon of a woman who is missing that final piece of the puzzle which life is denying her but is willing to do anything and everything to feel complete.”

Morgenthaler’s previous features Princess and Echo also deal with emotionally scarred family relationships, albeit in vastly different ways.

http://www.dfi-film.dk/i-am-here-2[07-11-2014 13:22:36]

Anders Morgenthaler’s fourth feature film is a thriller-drama featuring a cast of international stars including Kim Basinger, Jordan Prentice, Sebastian Schipper and Peter Stormare: Maria is a beautiful, successful business executive, struggling to fulfill her greatest wish of all: to bring a child into the world.

After suffering yet another miscarriage, a doctor informs Maria that she’s too old to carry a child – and her whole world comes crashing down. Devastated and unable to accept her fate, Maria sets out on a desperate and perilous quest to realize her dream of motherhood.

I Am Here in Danish Film Catalogue

DFI-FILM | Extreme Spaces and People

Princess (2006), building on Morgenthaler’s much-lauded graduation film Akari – The Killing of a Japanese Photographer, was a novelty in Danish cinema. Mixing animation and live action, the film is a gory drama about a young man avenging his sister who died working as a porn star. With his film, Morgenthaler takes a firm stand against pornography – and, in turn, against the widely held view that pornography is a rather innocuous part of a greater Danish tradition of liberalism.

He followed Akari up with Echo (2007), the story of a desperate, damaged cop who kidnaps his own son. Then, in 2009, Morgenthaler underscored his reputation as a versatile artist by co-writing and directing the animated children’s movie The Apple and the Worm (2009).

I Am Here, celebrating its world premiere at Austin Fantastic Fest, is produced by Marie Gade Denessen and Julie Lind-Holm for Zentropa.

Jonas Varsted Kirkegaard is a freelance writer.

I Am Here in Danish Film Catalogue

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