Discoveries from Denmark World Cinema

35mm short by Jens Jorgen Thorsen.

An eight-year montage road movie on a road to nowhere, shot through the windshield of a car. The shortest film of the year, covering a time span of infinite repition.

The first two years in Denmark’s only crisis centre for young people under 18. Joannahuset gives vulnerable young people a temporary home and a helping hand in the fight against a bureaucracy that doesn’t always listen to them.

A witty and intelligent meta-film in which the Danish-Turkish artist uses a performative re-enactment of the filming of one of his earlier films to illuminate the artistic process from new angles.

Max and Bastian are both between childhood and adolescence. Max was born a girl, but has come out as a transgender boy. And Bastian, born a boy, feels more like a girl. They are both faced with the choice of whether to start on hormones to end their puberty. But can you trust themselves when everything is constantly changing? Max and Bastian are surrounded by friends and family who do everything they can to understand them and help them to whatever they decide in Julie Bezerra Madsen’s equally empathetic film, which follows them through a period in life when everyone is changing – some of us just change a bit more than others.

Insightful diary about a young Danish basketball talent who goes alone to the US to test her skills and pursue her dream. But what do you do when you all of a sudden find yourself in another country during a worldwide lockdown?

The 76 year old Jenny Jespersen lives in Bovbjerg byt the west coast of Jutland in Denmark. She has a sober approach to life and a strong Christian faith. "A human with faith is like a bird without wings", she says. Poeticly the film shows Jenny and her everyday life on a farm with her bachelor son and all their habits. But it is also a portrait of a beautiful and special region shaped by rough weather and strong beliefs.

A believer and a non-believer are brought in doubt about their faith, when they stand face to face with death itself.

Ingunn is a young woman from the Faroe Islands who has moved to the big city of Copenhagen, where she desperately tries to fit into the hip clubbing scene. She goes out on the town with her Faroese cousin, who is already deeply immersed in the scene and therefore gives her instructions on how to behave at the night's masquerade ball. But perhaps the mask Ingunn has donned is too heavy to bear after all?

A touching, unexpected friendship anchors this stark, first-person window into psychosis – blurring the lines between reality and hallucination, fantasy and terror.

Denmark is, after Bangladesh, the most cultivated country in the world. This can be seen in our biodiversity, which has plummeted since the 1980s. We actually have less than two percent of wild nature left in Denmark, and something must be done about that now! The Danish Nature Foundation has purchased a large area in Hammer Bakker with production forest, which is to be converted into wild nature with large grasses, butterflies and, with a little luck, a golden eagle or two. But how do you make something wild that has been tamed for so long?

The fragment consists of three scenes from The Old Merchant’s Home. The first scene shows the meeting between a distinguished man (played by Philip Beck), a beautiful young woman, and another man. In the next scene, a train draws up at a platform. A boy is standing in the foreground, looking at the camera. In the last scene, a woman is sitting in a living room, sewing. A man enters and assaults her, but is driven out by someone else, who comes to her rescue. Next, two other people enter the living room. (stumfilm.dk)

Heine came home from war, but he is still struggling for his life every day.

Can you become a better person by playing role-playing games? Is it even possible to save yourself, the planet and everyone else? Are you necessarily evil just because you were born an orc? Get the answer when Niels Forsberg embarks on an adventure with new philosophical castles in the air and some really stupid jokes.

While at work, the dutiful caregiver Ellis is sought out by his long-lost sister Mira. Under the guise of being in training as a caretaker, she comes with him to work. Throughout a hectic workday, they try to find each other again, in a confrontation of old traumas, open wounds, and unrequited sibling love.

A comedy about a difficult friendship with the life-weary 55-year-old canteen lady Gunilla and her three interns.

In 1998 at Sct. Jørgens Skole in Næstved, the then 14-year-old Heino Hansen wrote a Danish essay that had his class in stitches. The otherwise shy and anonymous Heino became the funniest kid in the class from then on, and Heino Hansen was born! In Heino's first comedy show, you're taken back to the day he realized he was funny.

A documentary about women and their experiences having ADHD/ADD. Women are often forgotten and underrepresented when it comes to diagnosing and talking about ADHD/ADD. The documentary unfolds some of the misconceptions about ADHD/ADD and shows it through the eye of women who have it. As well as showing how it feels to be inside the mind of a person with ADHD/ADD.

In the fall of 2020, Olav Lundsgaard was on tour with his first one-man show: Kun et menneske. In Odense, Aarhus, Aalborg and a sold-out Comedy ZOO in Copenhagen, he brought his show full of jokes about autism, politics, everyday situations, football and much more.

How fortunate to have a partner who can make you dream so that it feels like a holiday But dreams, like reality, often have a few surprises in store....

Becoming Plant follows six dancers who participate in a therapeutic group experiment with psychedelics, while temporarily ‘living’ together on the demilitarised industrial site. While they are subjected to the plant’s consciousness and to each other’s presence, they perform a choreography, aligning their naked bodies with each other and with the architectural ruins. The film serves as a catalyst to discuss wider social and relational issues such as science, spirituality, psychiatry, healing, healthcare and the problems of collective depression and trauma resulting from living in the age of Late Capitalism. Becoming Plant features a specially composed soundtrack by London based electronic musician and visual artist Gaika.

Sandra is a young modern woman working hard to achieve her goals. She eats healthy and works out, but also takes time to enjoy a nice meal with her close friends and a glass of wine. Strange things start to happen around Sandra's house. She doesn't really notice in the beginning, but that all changes one day. One day Sandra is out running and she comes by 2 strangers scouting through a window. She yells at them, but they don't respond back. They just turn their head and look. This strange experience comes closer to her and things get more weird around her.

Carl Værnet exposed homosexuals in concentration camps for his experiments. After the war, a new life awaited in Argentina. The family still lives with the past.

A short video about the processing of matter, using found footage, all food-related, as its material. A comparatively unobtrusive soundtrack, though one which underlines the seriousness of the subject, has been added.

The video is made up of, on the sound side, a composition consisting of 58 words, in Japanese, accompanied by piano, and, on the image side, a series of images captioned, in Japanese and English, in correspondence with the recitation on the sound side. A title has been added. (Voice: Maya Taneda.)

‘We Are at Home’ is exploring themes of acknowledgement, participation and the awkward intimacy that comes with being human.

A second, penetrating look at other people’s discarded images in a reflective essay film about lost photographs.

Epileptic collage-composed exploration of the potential of art and social media to create both an honest and superficial space for self-promotion.

A Danish baron travels to Rome to convince the Pope to defend the world’s animals before it is too late for himself to continue the fight. Meet a lively and charismatic man on a passionate mission.

Danish Anna Karina became the big star of French cinema in the new wave of the 60s. A new portrait film sheds new light on the charismatic actress with her silent film mimicry and homemade dance moves.

40 people meet. 20 pairs. Each pair is a total of 100 years old. A one-year-old and a ninety-nine-year-old; a two-year-old and a ninety-eight-year-old; and so on and so forth. 2000 years of life.

A mind-expanding, cosmic sensory bombardment composed of 10,000 still images, linked together by Google’s artificial intelligence.

A tactile experience beyond the ordinary. Eight fun and touching minutes (that could have been much longer!) in the company of a band with special needs.

Will there ever come a time when no new ideas are left to invent?

Jeannette Ehlers is an artist and all of her art is centered around questions concerning structural racism. As the 100-year commemoration of the end of slavery in Denmark approaches, Jeannette decides to erect a monument - a huge statue of the female rebel leader Queen Mary, who was one of the main forces behind Denmark's first rebellion by enslaved people.

"Insyn" (Observation) is a dance film inspired by the Scandinavian mentality. The atmosphere is a little bit tense among the three characters in the film, as we meet them in a dark and quiet house somewhere in suburbia. We are in between naturalism and abstraction, at the boundary of dream and reality.

Adam stands between two choices, should he choose his gang or family?

Hear Me Out is a short documentary about the Ghanaian community journalist Helen Udanbila who manage a local radio programme which seeks to give a voice to the young girls and women in Saboba, Northen Ghana, Africa. It’s a hopeful and touching story about making a change for your local society in spite of structural inequality between gender. Through the development project called Youth Speak Up, the Danish NGO Ghana Friendship has created a platform where young Ghanaians, like Helen, get an opportunity to shed light on cultural taboos as teenage pregnancy, the education of women and abortion.

About the problems in connection with Denmark's reconstruction. The film shows the economic difficulties the war has caused for Denmark and tells about what we can do to get through the difficulties. The film was shot on the occasion of the offering of premium bond loans, and people are encouraged to make savings, among other things. by buying premium bonds.

Short animation by Sander Joon

An exaggeration of the wasteful process that goes into producing single-use plastics inside factories.

An artist film about the extraction of the mineral cryolite from Greenland. While cryolite was extremely valuable as it was used in the aluminium production and therefore became important for the production of weapons and aircraft industry during WW2, its dust was also poisonous for the workers and made their bones fragile and deformed. The work itself utilizes a piece of cryolite as a carrier of filmic archive material from its production and physical consequences on the landscape and the health of the workers.

'i am only present' addresses the material foundations of immigration detention in the UK, casting Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in the leading role. Narrated by the building itself, the film takes the viewer to the overgrown outskirts of Gatwick Airport, where time stands still for 508 detainees. Here they are hidden in plain sight, only a few meters from one of europe's busiest runways.

In the summer of 2019, a group of youths from Syria, Turkey, England and Denmark meet up for a two-week theatre workshop in Antalya. Here, they are given the task of staging human rights in a collective performance. First, they must agree on how to interpret the rights, both artistically and politically – and then it suddenly makes a difference if you come from Syria or Denmark, even if you are not aware of it yourself. The director Camille Bildsøe observes with an attentive presence how empathy and tolerance come about during the process. And, not least, how both can make an active difference in the real world.