"Once in a while you see a Danish film where, from the very first images, you sense that there is something exceptional going on," said Eva Novrup Redvall on behalf of the jury behind the annual Dreyer Award, presented this year to director Hlynur Pálmason for his debut feature 'Winter Brothers.' Read extract from the motivational speech below.
The Dreyer Award, named after Danish cinema's most distinguished classic figure, Carl Theodor Dreyer, celebrates outstanding artistic achievement among, primarily, young filmmakers.
The award is the latest accolade granted to Pálmason's film by critics and prize committees. Recently at the Danish Robert Awards, the film won a total of nine trophies, including for Best Danish Film, Best Director and Best Actor. At CPH PIX 2017, Pálmason won the main award, the New Talent Grand Pix.
Winter Brothers
A brother odyssey set in a worker environment during a cold winter. We follow two brothers, their routines, habits, rituals and a violent feud that erupts between them and another family. The film is a lack-of-love story, focusing on the younger brother Emil and his need to be loved and desired.
Internationally, the film has screened at festivals worldwide. It premiered at the Locarno Festival in August, where Elliott Crosset Hove won for Best Actor, and has since taken home awards from the festivals in Thessaloniki, Sevilla, Angers and Annonay, among others.
In France, the film received several four-star reviews after its theatrical release on 21 February, and other territories will presumably be following, as the drama is sold for distribution in a wide range of countries – including India, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, the United States, Canada and a string of Latin American countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and more.
Per Damgaard Hansen, the film's producer, believes that one of the reasons for the film's positive reception abroad is that the film makes good use of the universality of cinematic language.
"We often want to be rational and understand everything, but what we've been experiencing as we've travelled with the film is that people relate to the sensual and intuitive – that this way, they get a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human being and to have feelings than they would if it were told through dialogue.
"That's what people have responded to at home and abroad, namely the cinematic language. Then it doesn't really matter if the film is Danish, English or Nigerian," says Per Damgaard Hansen, co-founder of production company Masterplan Pictures, releasing its first feature film with 'Winter Brothers.'
Hlynur Pálmason received the Dreyer Award on 21 February at the Cinematheque in Copenhagen. Photo: Thomas Christensen
In need of a film like Winter Brothers
The following is an extract from Eva Novrup Redvall's motivational speech at the Dreyer ceremony held at the Danish Film Institute on 21 February:
"Once in a while you see a Danish film where, from the very first images, you sense that there is something exceptional going on. Or rather, from the very first sound, for in Hlynur Pálmason's 'Winter Brothers,' both sound and images work in a way that sharpen and challenge our senses from the very beginning.
"The first sequences of the wintry-cold drama take us downwards to the dark and unique noises of the limestone quarry. First there is only the sound. The rhythmic movements and the machines in the dark. Then we gradually catch a glimpse of the surroundings in the flickering light from the torches. Slowly, the sound level rises until we are imbued with the deafening noise of the work in the midst of men trying to communicate in spite of the infernal sound. The workday begins in this uncanny, timeless world.
"It's raw and intense, physical and fascinating. And the film continues to use images and sounds to focus on the sensuousness and the experience of being in an icy worker's drama about the everyday life and struggle of two brothers – in the dark as well as in the gray lime dust in the world above, in the white snow and in the run-down environment.
"Danish cinema has been needing a film like 'Winter Brothers.' There is much good to be said about the very different feature films coming out right now, but sometimes there are too many explanations and predictable stories. Hlynur Pálmason and the talented team in front of and behind the camera of 'Winter Brothers' insist that it is okay not to understand everything and that film above all is a sensuous, audiovisual medium."
