Olaf and his mother run a boarding house and a white slavery ring. They also smuggle heroin to keep the addict girls happy so they do not try and escape. A young couple move into the house and the evil landlords take a liking to the female.Read More »
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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 »
Plot Outline: Strings is a mythological story about the son of a king, Hal Tara, who sets out on a journey to revenge the death of his father. To his surprise he discovers the truth of his own people – and where he least expects it – he finds true love.
Actually this film is a bit short on plot but is technically stunning, and incorporates a number of unusual sight-gags, such as the portcullis to the walled city rising (not lowering) to keep people in (because everyone is a puppet and the raised portcullis blocks their strings)…Read More »
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A couple lose their young son when he falls out the window while they have sex in the other room. The mother’s grief consigns her to hospital, but her therapist husband brings her home intent on treating her depression himself. To confront her fears they go to stay at their remote cabin in the woods, “Eden”, where something untold happened the previous summer. Told in four chapters with a prologue and epilogue, the film details acts of lustful cruelty as the man and woman unfold the darker side of nature outside and within.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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Based on the personal recollections of Danish film journalist Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands is an episodic but thorough examination of the man and his works. Starting with the terrible reception of his first feature film Love Is Colder Than Death at the 1969 Berlin Film Festival, the bio-doc builds through photographs, stills, audio recordings and filmed interviews a portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his loose but consuming relationships with his family and the extended families he created around him. [MARK WILSHIN, Dog and Wolf]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 »