Danish Wave 2 is the title of a Danish festival in Moscow, offering a programme of critically acclaimed Danish films from recent years.
The film Festival takes place a few days before the Russian state visit to Copenhagen, where President Medvedev meets with Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen. The team behind the festival in Moscow are hoping that the visit will create a hype around Danish films in Russia.
Russian enthusiasm
For the last decade Russia has seen an increasing interest in Danish films. Especially the Danish Dogma wave met with curious enthusiasm among many Russians.
Among the films showcasing are Vinterberg's Berlin participant "Submarino", Ole Christian Madsen's boxoffice hit "Flame & Citron", Kristian Levring's "Fear Me Not" and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's "What No One Knows". Also playing is "The Invisible Cell", a documentary on a Danish terrorist cell, and Dorte Warnøe Høgh's Oscar-nominated "The Pig" along with a crop of other notable shorts.
After Moscow the festival continues to other major cities – Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Rostov, and Kaliningrad.
Singular poster
The poster for Danish Wave 2 is created by the Russian film distributor Igor Lebedev, who has distributed several Danish films in Russia. The red-and-white poster shows Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and Nicolas Winding Refn with the words "Danish Wave 2" under them: three generations of filmmakers gazing firmly towards the horizon. Lebedev was inspired by classic Russian iconography showing Marx, Engels and Lenin in the same posture.
Danish Wave 2 is organised by the Danish Embassy in Moscow and supported by the Danish Film Institute. The ambition is to make the festival a recurring event. Danish Wave was held for the first time in 2003 in Moscow. 
The poster leans on an imagery that is all-too familiar to a Russian audience: The constellation of Marx, Engels and Lenin has been a recurring feature in the iconography of the Russian Revolution. "The main point of this intertextual game is to use portraits of the three Danish directors, who belong to three different generations, to acknowlegde the importance of Danish cinema," says Igor Lebedev, the man behind the poster. The poster is unique in the sense that it's the first time an international festival in Russia makes use of this reference.
