Who really directed Christoffer Boe's fourth feature "Everything Will Be Fine", screening in Directors' Fortnight in Cannes? It took more than one take as Lasse Kyed Rasmussen, Boe's PA on the shoot a year back, met with the director and his lead actor Jens Albinus to try and find out.
Denmark lost its innocence when it became a warring nation, Janus Metz says. For six months the Danish filmmaker was embedded on the front lines in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. His documentary "Armadillo", selected for Critics’ Week, describes the brotherhood and sensitive sides of soldiers across from the cynical mechanisms of war.
For the second year running New Zealand born, Danish director Daniel Joseph Borgman has a short fiction film selected in Cannes, this year in the Critics’ Week programme. Berik is a story about friendship and lonesomeness in one of the world’s most remote regions.
OPINION. I'm not completely sure of the origin of the statement “the best film act in the world", nor whether it's absolutely true, but the fact remains that people ask us all the time: What's the secret behind the success of Danish film? How do you do it? How can so many interesting films and skilled filmmakers come out of a country of such insignificant size?
PROFILE. Christian Rank, Danish Producer on the Move, loves quirky films. He believes that small films can learn from the market orientation of big productions. No matter how specialised a film is, it’s still the producer’s task to find an audience for it.
Winning awards, making headlines, gaining international recognition – Danish women directors are doing exceptionally well right now. But is gender really still an issue?
Why doesn't Marjorie, Jenny's mother in "An Education", have a sewing machine? And why does Olympia from "Italian for Beginners" drop so many scones? There is always a story behind the story when Lone Scherfig creates her characters.
Mikkel Munch-Fals, known to Danes as a two-fisted film critic from TV, is making his debut as a feature film director with the ensemble drama Nothing's All Bad, a warts-and-all look at engulfing loneliness.
INTERVIEW / FIRST FEATURE. What's really at issue when Angelina Jolie, Mia Farrow or Madonna adopt a baby from a Third World country? Are they helping children or just exploiting them all over again? Carlos Oliveira's debut feature "Rosa Morena" explores what we're looking for in foreign cultures and where these wishful crossborder images lead us.
Hollywood in recent years has acquired the rights to remake a number of Danish films. Is Hollywood running out of stories? And how do the Danish filmmakers relate to the American versions of the film?
Danish animation studios are on fire these days. Never before have so many Danish animated features been in production at one time.
Veteran producer Nina Crone is making Freddy Frogface, a stereoscopic 3Danimated feature from the children's book classic by Ole Lund Kirkegaard, in partnership with animation studios in Beijing.
Shortly after graduating from the National Film School of Denmark in 2008, animation director Jan Rahbek pitched an idea at the Nordisk Film & TV Fond's Talent Pitch and won. Suddenly, Rahbek was knee deep in his first feature, a simian romp inspired by kitschy B-movies featuring giant robots and cool exotica music. FILM spoke with the talented young director and Thomas Borch Nielsen, the film's producer, about tight budgets, creativity and Dogme rules.
DREYER. On more than one occasion, Dreyer was labeled a sadistic director, because he caused his female leads to suffer in his tireless search of the sublime. One of the gems from the Dreyer archives is an unpublished article on bullfight where Dreyer fervently defends the beauty of the matador’s fight with the noble bull. The art of the bullfight exists in an ethical gray zone – like the one Dreyer explored throughout his career.