Letters from Denmark
10 short documentaries which form a presentation of Denmark as part of a dialogue project in the wake of the Muhammed drawings. 10 reputable Danish filmmakers are invited to create 10 presentations of Denmark, in collaboration with second-generation immigrants with roots in the Middle East. Each film is shaped as this person's personal application to a relative or acquaintance in the Middle East. The assignment is: Give an important statement about your Denmark, with the intention of challenging and differentiating the image your relative or acquaintance has of Denmark. The strength of the films is in insight and reflection, rather than the dramatic news approach and is communicated through the personal approach to the subject. The 10 films are joined together into one film (duration 58:30 mins), and this film will be a quick and intense contribution to the debate following the publication of the Muhammed drawings.
Per K. Kirkegaard
Morten Arnfred
Erik Clausen
Rumle Hammerich
Birgitte Stærmose
Sami Saif
Phie Ambo
Vibe Mogensen
Jens Loftager
Also Directed by Morten Arnfred
Morten Arnfred's warm comedy Lykkevej (Move Me) begins with Sara (Birthe Neumann) being left by her husband of a quarter century. Sara gets a job and moves into a new home on a street populated by eccentrics. Neighbor Robert (Jesper Lohmann) showers in his backyard, has been in mourning since his wife's death, and annoys his neighbors by keeping junk on his front yard. Sara and Robert tentatively strike up a relationship, while a couple on the street, Sus and Bo (Ditte Grbl and Asger Reher), have their own marriage issues to deal with. Move Me was screened at the Gothenburg Film Festival.
The series is set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the city and country's main hospital, nicknamed "Riget". "Riget" means "the realm" or "the kingdom" and leads one to think of "dødsriget", the realm of the dead.
A serial killer that decapitates people is on the loose in the Stockholm subway. Martin Beck and his colleagues try to catch the killer, while the panic in the city increases.
From a working class coming-of-age novel, Morten Arnfred fashioned his feature film to recapture the feel, the sting, the pain, but also the spirit of solidarity of the 1950s in the metropolitan city of Copenhagen: at the center, young Johnny, helpless, hapless, happy, unhappy, going through the motions of growing up. Bodil awards: Best Film and Best Actor (Allan Olsen).
Maria grows up in a seedy 1960s working class neighborhood, the daughter of an ambitious emigrant father and soon caught up in her own dangerously one track-minded pursuit of a violinist's career. A rich gallery of highly original characters contribute, for better and for worse, to Maria's coming of age. Based on Kirsten Thorup's critically acclaimed 1982 novel, filmed by Morten Arnfred.
Anna Pihl is a Danish police drama produced by TV2. The series stars Charlotte Munck as the title character Anna Pihl, Peter Mygind, and Iben Hjejle as Mikala. Three seasons have been produced, each having 10 episodes. The show follows the work and personal life of Anna Pihl, a policewoman at the Bellahøj police station in Copenhagen. She is divorced, and lives with her son, Mikkel, in a flat shared with Jan, her gay male friend. The show focuses on personal stories and realism: although it has action and suspense, it comes second to more realistic material. Besides Denmark, the series has been broadcast in Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. In Germany, the show was cancelled due to low ratings after the first nine episodes of season 1. A late night re-run started in September 2008. Season one aired in Estonia and in Australia on SBS One. In USA, Latin America and Portugal, Anna Pihl airs on Eurochannel. The theme song for season 1 was "Crosshair" by Blue Foundation, while the theme song for seasons 2 and 3 was "In the End I Started" by Swedish singer Maria Marcus and Dane Niels Brinck.
When a secretary at the Danish embassy in Russia dies in suspicious circumstances, the local police seem determined to close the case. But diplomat Jack Anderson, who has been brought in to observe, falls for a beautiful singer with ties to the murder and begins his own investigation.
Steffen is a good kid, a teenager who has recently finished school and is looking for work. He lives with his widowed mother, a newspaper reporter. Very little throws him off his stride, whether it is his girlfriend's jealousy of his friendship with Charly, a reform-school boy, or his mother's drunken, playful amorousness one night, because he reminds her of his father.
15-year-old Kim - an ordinary teenager, given mostly to himself, living with an unmarried mother in a small apartment. Once Kim together with an unfamiliar girl falls hostage during a bank robbery, but after making friends with the leader of the robbers, Kim and his new friend run away from them. Settling for a while in an empty house, teenagers fall in love.
Egon escapes from the psychiatric ward, where he has been incarcerated since the gang's last coup. Keld and Benny pick him up, and when Egon, as always, is planning the big heist, the Olsen Gang is once again on the move.
Also Directed by Erik Clausen
Combining the exultant sweep of epic period drama with the subtle intimacy of biography in a social perspective, this is a tale of materially impoverished childhood, struggling early manhood and an unrequited first love turned into good musical fortune for Carl Nielsen, one of the great composers of the 20th century. Based on the composer's autobiography, the film itself is designed to soar like a symphony.
Anna, a young and aspiring actress who has not had much success, offers to care for the father of Jorgen, who has been burdened with the responsibility. The father, Walentin, is in a mostly comatose state, which makes him the perfect audience for Anna, who begins acting out her scenes in front of him. Gradually, Walentin shows signs of recovery -- but is this due to Anna's kindness, or is it possible that the old man is a pretty good actor himself?
The early 1990s: 300,000 Danes are out of work. Viggo, a machinist with two grown children, is silent about feelings, scared he'll lose his job, loud about the value of trade unionism, interested in his pet fish, and argumentative at dinner. His wife Oda puts up with his moods and works on family genealogy. When Viggo is laid off, he becomes a fish out of water, hardly looking for work, starting a garden, and taking up with Karen, a polished but unhappy widow. He lies to his wife about a union training and goes to Mallorca with Karen. When she stops the affair, Viggo ends up in a psychiatric ward and must figure out what's really important in his life and in his character
Herluf lives a complacent life with his wife Inger-Lise. Their daily routines are only interrupted by their daughter's marriages, the third now about to take place. But Herluf's problems are more serious than an indecisive daughter, his wife is cheating on him and he's started forgetting things at work. And one day Herluf doesn't return home.
Eleven-year old Rikke lives alone with her father, whose only interest in life seems to be the soccer matches which appear on his television. Not surprisingly, Rikke is somewhat bored. She enters a contest put on by a cereal company which has as its grand prize a horse. Since she lives in the city in a second floor apartment, it never occurred to her that she might win, but win she does. The horse ("Mama-Mia") duly appears, and she and the members of her slum neighborhood come together to cope with the situation in a delightful way.
Old rockers, like soldiers, never die, they only pass away. Well, Erik Clausen turns nostalgia into a vivid tribute to the moods and manners of the 1950s Danish Rock'n Roll by picking up a group of dispersed fellow bandsmen from wherever life and fate have left them stranded to have them revive their group and relive the good old days. A spirit of social solidarity permeates throughout.
A Palestinian refugee living in Copenhagen is rescued from a gang of racist thugs by a young woman with whom he falls in love.
When career criminal John - the character from Clausen's drama-comedy »Temporary Release« (2007) - is granted parole, he hastens to Jutland to visit his son who is in difficulty. John might be a dedicated father, a perfect employee, and a great line-dancer, but life isn't exactly plain sailing.
Also Directed by Rumle Hammerich
A powerful modern film narrative, set in a historical framework, about the crucial encounter between vulnerable eighteen-year-old Hans Christian Andersen, who rates himself so highly, and Mr. Meisling, the cynical school principal. An encounter that fundamentally transforms Hans Christian's life.
High school student Mikaela is attracted by her Swedish teacher Göran and writes an erotic novel for his class.
The movie compiled from the Swedish TV series "Dårfinkar & dönickar" aired in 1988
Young Berra has a friend, Ulf. Ulf has a grandfather which he likes very much, he gives Ulf presents and takes him on fishing trips. Berra doesn't have a grandfather, but he wants one that's nice to him and who can teach him to whistle. Ulf knows where to find a grandfather - at a home for senior citizens. They go searching together and Berra finds a great pretend grandfather, Nils.
The boy Topper is bored. He finds a pencil that proves to have magical powers. Draw a rhino, and right away, you have a real rhino for a companion. A little heavy perhaps, when you live on the second floor. No matter, it's a modern fairy-tale of the baroque, and everything goes. Based on kiddie entertainment by Ole Lund Kirkegaard, but as was the case with the book, the fun is to be enjoyed by one and all.
Martin Vinge, former notorious journalist, now successful headhunter with a complicated personal life, is in all confidentiality contacted by 85 year-old N.F. Sieger, S.E.O. of Denmark's largest shipping company and oil empire. Sieger hires Martin to find an alternative heir to the firm instead of his son, Daniel Sieger, who for a long time has been destined to take the company into the next era. Martin starts coming up with suitable names for the position, but discovers that he has actually been entangled in a larger impenetrable power game aimed at deciding what is really going to happen to the company; a brutal power struggle that puts an intense pressure on Martin and his private life and relationships.
Also Directed by Birgitte Stærmose
Fusing documentary and fiction, the film depicts the lives of children trying to survive the aftermath of war in Kosovo by selling cigarettes on the street. Through monologues performed by the children against the eerie backdrops of Pristina, the film tells their gripping and sad story of memory, loss and fear.
The beautiful Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon, navigates the royal lineage of England with an eye on the throne.
The moving love story of a dancer on the rollercoaster ride of her life, a drama about the rise and fall of a modern woman as she summons the courage to face her greatest trial.
Norskov is a police drama that takes place in an industrial city in northern Denmark. The city is raw and unsentimental, and the financial crisis has left its mark, but there is still a lot of community spirit and empowerment. In the series we follow the policeman Tom Noack, who returns to the city he left almost 20 years ago, and his two childhood friends who in the meantime have become the mayor and primary contractor.
In a Copenhagen hotel, disparate lives intersect through accident or fate: A stewardess desperate for intimacy. An immigrant obsessed with revenge. A hotel manager lost in despair. A wife abandoned by her husband. A receptionist with blood on his hands. People meet in the intimacy of hotel rooms, secrets are revealed and unexpected events merge into a dramatic tale of love and longing.
Catherine of Aragon is the Princess of Spain, who has been promised the English throne all her life. She arrives in a rain-lashed England with her glorious and diverse court including her ladies-in-waiting Lina and Rosa. When her husband dies suddenly, the throne seems lost to Catherine until she sets her sights on the new heir, the future King Henry VIII.
Also Directed by Sami Saif
In New Hampshire, a legend is buried. GG Allin, the most outrageous singer in rock'n roll history. He was known for defecating on stage, fighting and having sex with the audience. He died a mythological death from a heroin overdose in 1993, aged 37. Directed by the award-winning director Sami Saif, THE ALLINS is a loving and entertaining look at the family of the departed rock singer.
Autumn 1973, few days before her first suicide attempt, two journalists visit danish poet Tove Ditlevsen, for a talk on her self-made obituary.
This film depicts the intense drama that takes place during the making of Dogville. Lars von Trier and Nicole Kidman work through this creative process under very extreme conditions.
The directors, who are also partners, take a journey in pursuit of Sami's father, who abandoned his Danish family when Sami was very young.
Intimate portrait of the social outcast Ricardo Lopez, chronicling the last days of his life in 1996 as he creates and sends a letter bomb rigged with sulfuric acid to Icelandic singer Björk and heads home to record his own suicide on video.
Also Directed by Phie Ambo
A documentary about Nicolas Winding Refn and his economical problems after Fear X.
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
The grass is greener than green, the flowers in the backyards are bright and blooming, and the many fences have a fresh coat of paint. These are the private paradises in which the Danes in The Home Front live. But wait a minute - is that a dog barking? Is that gardener peeking over the fence, and are the branches he's trimming falling on the right side? The smallest trifle in the world can send neighbors who once merrily drank beer together into arguments that last years. But when the distrust is so thick you can cut it with a knife, there's still hope. In order to help the desperate parties, the Danish government came up with the Fence Committee, an institution that mediates and makes binding decisions when necessary.
Have you ever known who was calling before you answered the phone, or felt you were being watched while in an empty room? Is it possible to exist across multiple worlds simultaneously? When her young daughter insists she’s sometimes human and sometimes an animal, filmmaker Phie Ambo wonders what else might exist outside a singular human consciousness. Committing to the principal of randomness, she plumbs the minds of various leading thinkers, from the father of string theory to a Buddhist monk, from a clairvoyant to a janitor. Just as impressive as their fascinating ideas, however, is the visual correlative of this ever-deepening metaphysical query. Who would expect the mysteries of existence to lurk inside the grease trap at an amusement park or in a single cup of tap water? Prepare to have your reality permanently altered by this mind-boggling, impossible and thoroughly compelling film.
"Mechanical Love" is a documentary on the interrelationship between robots and humans. The film portrays people who have a close relationship with a robot, and it takes us from the high temple of robot technology, Tokyo, Japan, to Braunschweig, Germany, to Italy and back to Copenhagen, Denmark. By this world tour director Phie Ambo seeks to highlight the human need for love and our craving to be loved by others - perhaps the two most important aspects of life. Through the main characters, she examines the cultural differences in how we accept emotional robots in the East and the West.
The directors, who are also partners, take a journey in pursuit of Sami's father, who abandoned his Danish family when Sami was very young.
Niels Stokholm is one of the most idealistic farmers in Denmark. He runs the biodynamic farm with his wife, Rita, and from their farm, Thorshøjgaard, they distribute products to some of the best restaurants in the world.But not everyone is equally fond of Thorshøjgaard and their holistic methods. Authorities and bureaucracy threaten to close down the farm. Phie Ambo follows their struggle to make sure that they are not the last to do agriculture the way they do, but some of the first.
In 2019, thousands of Danish children and youths took to the streets. They stayed away from school to demonstrate for the climate, mobilise their parents and grandparents, and demand action – now! When elections were called later the same year, it was clear that green climate policies attracted voters, and suddenly the climate was at the top of the political agenda. ‘70⁄30’ portrays the creation of one of the world’s most ambitious climate laws, with the goal of reducing Denmark’s CO2 emissions by 70% by 2030. But will the politicians, citizens and industry be able to come together to make Denmark a green pioneer? Or will the election promises and green ambitions crumble when the new climate law is faced with reality?
A group of children develop the possible society of the future on an overgrown building site in a deeply democratic film, which gives nature a voice.
Also Directed by Vibe Mogensen
Also Directed by Jens Loftager
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a 70-kilometre long fence was erected on the border between Germany and Denmark. The fence was intended to secure Danish pigs against African swine flu but ended up splitting apart Southern Jutland and German families and farmers, who have land, friends and family on both sides of the fence. The fence ended up having a destructive significance for an identity that otherwise knows no boundaries. Through archive footage and touching portraits, we are shown a warm and, at times, tragicomic look at a new everyday life for both Danes and Germans, where old friends have to meet on either side of the fence. And all of this on the 100th anniversary of the reunification of Southern Jutland – and the year corona hits.
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