Danish

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The white sand sparkles in the hot sun beside the clear blue waters of the Turkish Riviera. Young, blonde, clad in light summer garb and an oversized hat, Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) looks as though she was made for this place. She drifts around the hotel pool on an inflatable crocodile, leans out laughing in the bow of a yacht or giggles over cocktails. One day, buying strawberry ice cream, she catches the eye of a young Dutchman, Thomas (Thijs Römer). But Sascha is already attached – to fortysomething mobster Michael (Lai Yde) – a man whom she has already learned will respond to disloyalty with violence…Read More »

From the cover:
In this small film, shot in Estepona in the south of Spain, Jørgen Leth and Ole John pursue the principle of asynchronisation and the juxtaposition of disparate elements. The images are footage from a barbershop, a talking man’s face and black film. The sound likewise embraces three elements: a story of how cement is made, which has neither head nor tail; a recording of a shave; and Louis Hjulmand’s score. The tight framing lends the mundane act of a shave a beauty of its own. Meanwhile, in the juxtaposition of near-rambling monologue and music, something else emerges, something more. As a viewer, you try to connect the two, but because no such connection exists, you have to surrender to the pure “experience” of images and sound. The title, a Danish Social-Democratic election slogan, is meaningless in this context. However, if you play around with the juxtaposition of the world “security” and the shots of the man’s soft skin and exposed neck under the barber’s sharply honed razor, the mock meaning rubs up against an altogether different one.Read More »

When one of the members of a gang of young criminals wants out, he is put under severe pressure.Read More »

This central work makes a grotesque attempt to organize life according to a series of captions, cataloguing life’s elements. No more, no less. A series of tableaux showcases actors and other well-known Danes as ‘examples’ of the emotions, conditions or phenomena discussed by the neutral, authoritative voiceover: Faces, Bodies, Objects, Necessary Acts, Unnecessary Acts, Good Thougts, Bad Thoughtd and more. Leth opens with a typical statement: ‘Life is interesting. We will study it.’ The director has described the film as a collage or a catalogue of life. Elsewhere, he has called it a surrealist comedy. A bit of everything, it looks like no other film ever made.Read More »

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[Kære Irene] is a curiously Muggeridgian movie attacking the new, sexually liberated society of Denmark from an undoctrinaire Marxist standpoint. Thomsen’s people have achieved freedom; indeed they talk about almost nothing else. They sleep around, they are unillusioned, they know the limits of their responsibilities. Flesh slaps sullenly on flesh, and after lovemaking there is always a bottle of beer to be opened, an appointment to be kept, a husband and a child to return to. Isolation is a condition accepted as inevitable as life itself. – Jonathan Raben, New Statesman, England.Read More »

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A father returns to his old hometown with his young family. Events force him to face the small town’s xenophobia.Read More »

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A Danish summer: long days turn into blue nights. A tunnel is being built to connect Denmark and Germany. Three people meet and part ways again.Read More »

A collections of scenes based on documents, letters, pictures and poems that depict a man’s erotic nature.Read More »

In 1960s Denmark, an alcoholic playboy and a meek tax lawyer join forces to revolutionize the travel industry and alter the country’s political landscape, in this shocking, often hysterical, always compelling quasi-biopic.
Since his Camera d’Or-winning debut feature Reconstruction, Christoffer Boe has explored the power of memory — and its capacity to mould an individual’s perception of reality. With his latest, the sometimes shocking, always-compelling quasi-biopic Sex, Drugs & Taxation, he examines collective memory, which, as it turns out, is equally as prone to delusion.Read More »