An intent fast paced Danish dark comedy film about two separately motivated brothers who with their slightly psychopathic tendencies end up in a touchy situation. One brother gets in serious trouble after a bank robbery and begs the other brother for help.Read More »
Step on Silence was made from raw material from Peter Martins – en danser but unlike the traditional way the Martins film communicates its material in this case we have a film that with its slightly dusty, scratchy appearance makes room for all the shots originally discarded for technical or narrative reasons. It fades to black and up again if visual material is lacking at any given moment, for example, while the continuity of the soundtrack is maintained. The establishing by the cameraman of a new frame or focus is not edited out for the sake of appearances. The painstaking repetitions from the rehearsal room are captured by showing several takes of the same detail from the dance one after the other. Read More »
Peter Martins – en danser is a classical documentary using illustrative visuals, interviews with the subject, and a linking narrative voice over paints a portrait of the Danish ballet star with the New York City Ballet. “I cannot deal with second best people”, the handsome, self-assured Martins says, describing himself as a monstrously ambitious man who is however able to regard his work as a continual learning process. The film follows Martins as a dancer and choreographer, primarily in the rehearsal room but also on stage.Read More »
Subversive satirist Mads Brugger’s latest is an odd-couple comedy about the pitfalls of striking out into the economic frontier; it charts two hapless Danes’ scheme to sell Saint Bernards to China’s rising middle class.Read More »
Anne, a successful lawyer, lives in a beautiful modernist home with her two daughters and physician husband, Peter. Yet when Gustav, Peter’s troubled teenage son from another relationship, comes to live with them, she forms an intimate bond with him that jeopardizes her perfect life. And what initially seems like a liberating move for her soon turns into a disturbing story of power, betrayal, and responsibility with devastating consequences.Read More »
Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), September 18th, 1961. Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld mysteriously dies in a plane crash. Decades later, Danish journalist and filmmaker Mads Brügger and Swedish researcher Göran Björkdahl investigate the case looking for a definitive closure, but instead they discover much more than the killing of Secretary-General to the United Nations.Read More »
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The story opens just before Christmas, when solitary, apathetic bank clerk Flemming Borck uncovers a plot to rob his bank. (It’s a convoluted set-up, so we’ll just leave it at that.) After doing a little rookie recon, Borck identifies the would-be bank robber as a faux shopping-mall Santa Claus, and counter-plots to steal the money himself and let Santa take the blame. This works out about as badly as you might imagine, and our bumbling protagonist spirals further and further away from the carefree, laconic lifestyle he had hoped to ensure for himself.Read More »
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This Danish omnibus film consists of 20 shorts, by a bevy of international directors; the project
as a whole was conceived by Danish visual artist Ane Mette Ruge and Dutch opera-director Jacob F. Schokking. The title represents a pun; in addition to its obvious sensationalistic implications (which is used ironically – almost nothing in the film, aside from some incidental nudity, is exploitative), the “everything” refers to the plethora of subjects at hand, with the filmmakers exploring topics from national identity to ornithology, to trips abroad to Vietnam and Brazil, to the history of Berlin. Shown at the 1998 Gothenburg Film Festival.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 »