Discoveries from Denmark World Cinema

A stream of objects. A receipt printer. The author connects his immediate emotions and thoughts to objects that he is about to get rid of. Fractured memories weaves together unconnected parallel stories of inner feelings and memories.

A Savoyard peasant family is banished from their home because they have not paid their taxes on time. When the count sees the family’s beautiful daughter Annette, he immediately suggests that they can stay if Annette comes to the estate as a housemaid. Plainly seeing the count’s disgraceful plans for what they are, the father, Antonio, resolutely rejects the offer. To raise money, Annette, her brother and a friend travel instead to Paris where Annette meets and falls in love with the count’s son Henry. When Annette’s father sets out to Paris to fetch the children home to his sick wife, he is horrified at the sight of his daughter’s newfound wealth. Has she sold herself for mere money? (Stumfilm.dk)

An alternative Danish film. A montage of quickly edited footage (upside down, mirrored, black and white, color etc.) of various sights, Danish culture, history and nature.

Each powerful step in one woman's wild, ritualistic journey to freedom is told with both tenderness and rawness.

After losing his girlfriend, a young man goes out on an odyssey through the night, accompanied by his own inner voice, Marcel.

Centered on a couple newly in love, the film explores why people time after time enter new love relationships.

Film portrait of Danish jazz musician and trumpeter Jakob Sørensen.

A portrait of the person and the artist Erik Clausen.

A Danish filmmaker goes to Egypt to make a film about a group of Egyptian composers, but discovers that he is on a cultural outsider in the advanced Arab music theory.

A gentle and demystifying story about four different people’s subjective experiences of voluntarily receiving electroshock treatment.

Colour, perception and subjectivity merge in a film in which impressionistic paintings constantly dissolve into pure colours and brushstrokes.

A conceptual video work from the residential area Mjølnerparken in Copenhagen, exploring the complex relationship between gentrification and marginalisation.

Artist and musician Lars Greve’s performative one-take work is a corporal trip through an abstract space, where the improvisations of a clarinet resonate with almost cosmic force.

An audiovisual work set to new music by composer August Rosenbaum, created by the artists Freja Sofie Kirk and Kamil Dossar.

Tomic was born in Yugoslavia right after Tito’s death, but fled during the war to Denmark, and while he was digging up the roots of his childhood, he could watch the images of his Bosnian coun-trymen in concentration camps on TV. In ‘My Lost Generation’, Tomic tells his own as well as his generation’s story by examining what a war can do to a human being. It’s a frightening project, but it’s only through filming that he can overcome his traumas. Fear, violence, scars and distrust are unavoidable premises for the identity-less director, who with his training background from the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts manages to communicate his experiences in a visual, raw and poetic way.

Inspired by biologist Suzanne Simard’s concept of network topologies, which denote the intricate interrelationships of forest ecosystems and include both human and nonhuman life forms, artist Pia Rönicke conjures a polyphonic narrative of nature as an arena for complex and conflicting forces. A network of narratives that ‘Drifting Woods’ activates through botanical studies, close observations and conversations with some of the local and visiting people who work in and with the forest. Over the last 250 years, large-scale industry has increasingly capitalised on natural resources in a process where the mapping of the forest has been singularly focused on reducing both land and trees to raw materials. Rönicke dares the opposite movement: a ‘de-mapping’ of the forest and a decentralisation of the modern gaze that always places humans as the natural centre of everything. The film ‘Drifting Woods’ is based on Pia Rönicke’s installation of the same name.

They are the ones the others are not allowed to play with. But 80-year-old Inger nonetheless gives a home and some much-needed love to the misfits she invites to live in her big mess of a villa in a small town somewhere in Denmark. Some of them have lived there for years, while others drop by for a brief mention and have moved on before anyone found out what they were even called. Abuse and mental illness are an important part of the story, but not the whole story. For Inger insists that there is good in all people and that the most important thing is to learn to love ourselves. But when Inger suddenly falls ill herself, the guests in her self-designed microcosm must learn to send some of the love and care the other way. Director Jella Bethmann paints a vivid and ultimately life-affirming portrait of ‘bad company’ in a film that gives space to some of the people who don’t fit into society’s conformist puzzle of norms and frames.

Playing with Lego and testing stop-motion with Super 8. Released in 1973, 5/14/2013 (online)

Conceived by acclaimed British creative technologist Antonia Forster, along with Thomas Terkildsen, this immersive project is the world's first virtual reality museum dedicated to celebrating the stories and artwork of LGBTQ people by preserving queer personal histories. The museum contains 3D scans of touching personal artifacts, from wedding shoes to a teddy bear, chosen by people in the LGBTQ community and accompanied by their stories told in their own words. The in-person version presented at Tribeca is a never-before-seen biometric experience controlled by users’ emotions in real-time.

Huxi Bach actually has doubts. But doubts are good, because then you're not so sure after all. The only certainty is that Huxi is ready to take on big and small issues.

Confronted with the suicide attempt of their younger sister, siblings Marcus and Liv uncover the skeletons in the closet of their family.

Manifestation is a semi-autobiographical Avantgarde, Art-House short film based on the life experiences of writer and director Danny Germansen's own life with disability, depression, isolation, mental abuse and loneliness.

A Danish short movie.

When the students of Helgenæs Boarding School in Denmark go hunting together, it is primarily about what gets shot and who shoots it. But for these youngsters, who seem to find themselves somewhere in between childhood and adulthood, the hunt is a focal point for a shared culture as well as an identity. It becomes their way of tackling the transition into adulthood.

William is fed up with Næstved. He is tired of living in a field, from where he has to cycle 20 minutes in the dark to get to town, he is tired of keeping half his life secret from his mother and father. And he is tired of his best friend Magnus also starting to behave like his parents. Magnus is fed up with Larry not knowing how to take care of his pets, which always end up dying. Larry is pretty fed up with being called Larry. The three 19-year-old friends are approaching adulthood, and their carefree days of ice-cold beers, shoplifting, and dreams of traveling the world on a shared fishing boat are coming to an end. William is facing a crisis of loyalty. The choice is between their shared boyhood dreams and William's own. Should he stay in Næver or go his own way?

A darkly humorous and poetic tale about a small person in a big universe. In 1870s London, industrialisation and the pursuit of progress have changed people. In the city, we meet Emma, whose boyfriend has left her for a promotion. Left to an uncertain fate, she is led by a black cat into a disused theater, where she encounters the down-and-out magician Roberto. Determined to prove his worth, he puts everything into impressing Emma with one last spectacular show. But the magic is out of control, and Emma is not entirely above board.

Nitesh's father has made a decision. It will not only change the rest of his life, but also that of his children - forever. He wants to give up his Danish residence permit and move back to India, where he originally came from when he moved to Denmark.

Our global food system is under transformation. For decades, it has impoverished the earth, by costing it hundreds of animal and plant species, releasing gigatons of carbon emissions and costing real human lives. The way we produce, distribute and consume food is not up to the task of feeding 9-10 billion people without destroying the planetary conditions we depend on.

Documentary portraying the dramatic events which took place during the rescue of the Danish Jews in World War II.

A portrait of the sparsely populated and spellbound island of Mykines in the Faroe Islands, as the outside world imposes itself upon a centuries-old way of life.

Lin Alluna's 2016 documentary following a couple from Jordan

Conversations between women at the first Femø Women's camp in 1971.

A PERFECT STORM is a landscape film or, more precisely, a landscape imprinted on the film's emulsion. The artist has used seeds, tiny composite flowers and other small elements of cultivated plants that grow in his garden and wild plant species gathered from a nearby nature reserve.

In 2007, something happened in the NHL that had never been seen before. For the first time in the league’s 90 year history a player from Denmark, a tiny country with no hockey tradition, took to the ice. And it didn’t stop there. In the following years, even more Danish players unexpectedly broke through to the NHL. But the most amazing part of this story, is that these players didn’t just come from Denmark. Unbelievably, they all came from the same small town. Welcome to Herning, a town with a population of only 50,000 in the middle of nowhere in Western Denmark. But in just nine years, Herning sensationally produced five NHL players. In the same time period, Chicago produced three, and Detroit produced four. This is the story about how little Herning against all logic become a hotbed of NHL players.

When trailer goes kidsss

A guilt-ridden taxi driver takes a desperate passenger to her destination. On the journey their fates collide and they both realize that they have to make a final sacrifice in order to be redeemed.

In this small fragment from the cartoon A Wonderful Dream, a rotund man pines for delicious stuff. First, he watches enviously through a keyhole at a clown who’s holding a party. Then a naughty decanter of water on the table conjurs up thoughts of neat whiskey. (stumfilm.dk)

Soanin Kilangit is determined to unite the people and attract international tourism through the revival of culture on Baluan Island in the South Pacific. He organizes the largest cultural festival ever held on the island, but some traditional leaders argue that Baluan never had culture and that culture comes from the white man and is now destroying their old tradition. Others, however, take the festival as a welcome opportunity to revolt against '70 years of cultural oppression' by Christianity. A struggle to define the past, present and future of Baluan culture erupts to the sound of thundering log drum rhythms.

A young woman confronts her father in a rare and deeply personal insight into the pain and insecurities that embed themselves in the relatives of addicts.

Erotic voice messages and secret night meetings connect two women as they try to live out their forbidden love in Beirut.

A warm and absurdist tableau comedy about the Danes’ various occupations and uses of their summer houses.

Mette’s near-death experience was so overwhelming for her that she longs to return to understand it. Now she is trying to reconstruct it in virtual reality so she can share her experience with the world.

For eight years, Master Chef Rasmus Kofoed has been obsessed with a dream - a dream of winning the Bocuse D’OR, the individual world championship for chefs in fine gourmet cooking. The film follows the 36-year-old chef, who is as much an artist as a cook, during the six months leading up to the championship and tells the story of an occupation that seems more like an elite sport than anything else. It provides a rare glimpse into Rasmus’ world and the time, passion and belief in oneself necessary to achieve the excellence to become the world’s best Master Chef.