Bille August

The story follows Anton, whose top priority is to complete his training as a cavalry officer. During training he orders his platoon to help a local Baron and he meets the Baron’s daughter Edith, who has been in an accident.Read More »

Aged 63, Karen Blixen, the Danish author best known for her autobiographical novel “Out of Africa,” is at the pinnacle of her fame and next in line to win the Nobel Prize for literature . It has been 17 years since she gave up her famous farm in Africa, only to return to Denmark with her life in ruins. Devastated by syphilis and having lost the love of her life, she has reinvented herself as a literary sensation. She is an isolated genius, however, until the day she meets a talented 30-year-old poet. She promises him literary stardom if he in return will obey her unconditionally – even at the cost of him losing everything else in his life…Read More »

Chile, second half of the 20th century. The poor Esteban marries Clara and they get a daughter, Blanca. Esteban works hard and eventually gets money to buy a hacienda and become a local patriarch. He becomes very conservative and is feared by his workers. When Blanca grows up, she falls in love with a young revolutionary, Pedro, who urges the workers to fight for socialism. It is unavoidable that Pedro and Esteban are pitted against each other. Esteban tries to stop the love affair between Pedro and his daughter by all means possible but soon Blanca becomes pregnant and has a daughter. The void between father and daughter seems unbridgeable when Blanca moves in with Pedro.Read More »

When his wife dies, Lassefar takes his 12-year-old son Pelle from their home in Sweden to Denmark in search of a better life. Signing on as laborers at a large farm, father and son undergo numerous trials, including prejudice against immigrants and run-ins with those more powerful than themselves in both the physical and the social sense. Over the course of a year, young Pelle learns what it takes to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world.Read More »

Scripted (but not directed) by Ingmar Bergman, Best Intentions is a multilayered backwards glance at the courtship of Bergman’s own parents. Henrik Bergman (Samuel Froler) is a struggling theology student in the year 1909. His intended, Anna Aakerbloom (Pernilla August, who married director Bille August while the film was in progress) is from a well-to-do family. Despite the expected class differences and personality clashes, love-or at least mutual understanding-prevails. But after a harsh, spare few years as the wife of a clergyman, Anna yearns for the more bountiful pleasures of her family home. Bergman writes himself into the proceedings as a mewling infant. The current three-hour theatrical version of Best Intentions (original title: Den Goda Viljan) was simultaneously prepared as a six-hour TV miniseries, which ran in Europe, Scandanavia, and Japan.Read More »

REVIEW by Angus Wolfe Murray (from eyeforfilm.co.uk):

When Smilla Jasperson came home that winter’s day in Copenhagen, the boy lay dead on the pavement. He had been playing on the roof, the police said, and probably slipped on ice.

She was friends with the boy, a six-year-old Greenlandic Inuit, who lived with his alcoholic mother one floor down in her apartment block. She knew he had a fear of heights and would never have been up there unless something, or someone, had forced him.Read More »

A young man, Jens, gets a job in a Copenhagen factory. He lives with his mother and has been without a job for a while. One day he meets Kirsten, who works at the library, and asks her out. He meets her parents, and soon they are married. They move into a house, Kirsten stops working, and they prepare their lives together. But Kirsten soon starts to feel a discontent that turns into depression and detachment. Jens fights to stay close to her, but eventually he must decide if he is suited for the respectable life he has built for himself. (IMDb)Read More »

Raimund Gregorius, a Swiss Professor, abandons his lectures and buttoned-down life to embark on a thrilling adventure that will take him on a journey to the very heart of himself.Read More »