Tag: Danish

Gutterbee

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

Two outcasts join forces in order to set up a German restaurant in the fictional Midwestern town of Gutterbee, a shabby cowboy and white supremacist paradise. Mike McCold (Antony Starr) is a local who has just been released from the “slammer” (prison), and is now seeking redemption from his past crimes through an honest trade, while the German immigrant Edward Hofler (played by iconic Scottish actor Ewen Bremner, who does come across as über German) wants Americans to experience his culture, particularly his sausages and the Bavarian Schuhplattler (slap dance).

The two unlikely business partners have to contend with the highly xenophobic and flamboyantly named Jimmy Jerry Lee Jones Jr. (W. Earl Brown), a local singer, cowboy and petty gangster with a profound dislike for anything vaguely un-American. He has previously tortured and expelled a Chinese man called Chan from the community (with a helping hand from Mike, who ended taking the blame and the custodial sentence). He despises his son Hank because he believes that he’s a homosexual. Mike attempts to convince his former associate that the German restaurant may not be a bad idea after all. He’s nearly persuaded once Mike proposes a white Bavarian (sausage) should be made bigger and called a White American instead. The social satire is silly and puerile. Never caustic, stinging and dry.

The film is peppered with peculiar characters. They include Sheriff TV Brown, who is obsessed with a receding hairline, the enthusiastic cabaret/local joint owner Luke Kenneth Hosewall, and so on. There is also a pretty lady called Sue with a prosthetic leg (which Edward loves varnishing, alongside his furniture). She’s the only prominent female character, in this grotesquely white and masculine world. A film guaranteed not to pass the Bechdel test.

This is the second feature film by Ulrich Thomsen, after In Embryo (2016). Both films are set in the US. The 36-year-old actor-turned-director is neither American nor German, but Danish instead. He does, however, knows what it feels to be a foreigner in the Land of the Free, having previously worked as pizza delivery boy on American soil.

Gutterbee feels too long at just 107 minutes. That’s because the movie script, which was also penned by Thomsen, is highly convoluted. It tries too hard to extract humour from every single sequence, every single minute. And that gets tiring. Plus the story is broken down into incomprehensibly-titled chapters (I’m still not sure whether that was deliberate). The jokes about sausage are hackneyed and repetitive, while the references to German culture are too esoteric. There are multiple attempts at highbrow slapstick, such as in the slap dance, but it just comes out as infantile and not funny at all. At best, Gutterbee is a charming feelgood comedy, and it might occasionally make you smile. But it won’t make you burst out laughing.

Gutterbee just saw its world premieres at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, as part of the event’s official Competition.

Sons of Denmark (Danmarks Sønner)

Posted on by victorfraga

Shakespeare famously proclaims in Hamlet: “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”. In Sons of Denmark something is indeed very rotten in the Scandinavian country. Forget nice social democrat Denmark, the land of hygge, Danish pastries and the Little Mermaid. This is a country where migrants live in fear of vicious, xenophobic gangs, where pigs’ heads are deposited where Muslims gather, and random acid attacks are made on innocent foreigners. This film is an impressive debut by its director and writer Ulaa Salim. Made by the migrant community in Denmark, mainly Syrian and Iraqi, and their sympathisers, it portrays a country of cruel disdain for those who seem just a bit different.

Consider this. Hitler took power in Germany under laws and agreements that were, in the terms of the Weimar Constitution, entirely legal. True, there was a lot of thuggery accompanying his accession to power but he was formerly invited to be Chancellor by President Hindenburg in a acceptable normal manner. The community that Hitler vilified as dangerous Marxists, greedy capitalists and sexual perverts were one of the most integrated in Europe. The list of Jewish contributors to German thought and culture is embarrassingly long. The Sons of Denmark are a collection of thugs led by the obnoxious Martin Nordahl (Rasmus Bjerg), who claims to have nothing to do with the nasty behaviour of the fascist right wing group. In fact, he helps to organise it and even participates in it (albeit wearing a mask). The Sons of Denmark eventually win a general election in Denmark.

Ulaa Salim, the writer and director of this hard-hitting film, takes the above political logic and shows how it might come true in Denmark. The migrants depicted in the film are ordinary people mainly from Syria or Iraq, who have often endured terrible suffering and lost members of their families in getting to Denmark. Some are so poor, they live in cellars, their families only partitioned off from other families by curtains. They are trying desperately to rebuild their lives and earn a living. True, they are different, being Muslim and having different habits, and some of them are Islamists (an explosion let off by such opens the film) but the vast majority are entirely decent and moderate people. Ali (Zaki Youssef), one of the leaders of the community, describes the Islamists as “morons”.

Despite all this, they are harassed, attacked and described as “terrorists”, “rapists” and “thieves”. Remember Nigel Farage’s migrants poster just before the Brexit referendum? Nothing in this film depicts anything that is impossible. A group of young migrant men under the direction of Ali try to fight back against the attacks. Even if you try to co-operate with the authorities as Hassan does (Imad Abul-Foul), this does not stop your family from being viciously assaulted in your own home.

Against all this is the sometimes sincere but generally lacklustre support of the Danish police against the Sons of Denmark. You feel that actually their sympathies lie with Martin Nordahl – not the migrant community. Again one is reminded of the enthusiastic support of the German police in helping the Nazis round up leftist opponents when Hitler took power.

This superb Danish movie operates like a police thriller mixed with politics, and it raises many urgent questions. Those who like Scandi-noir will enjoy the twists and turns of the plot, accompanied effectively by the score of Mozart’s Requiem.

Sons of Denmark is in cinemas on Friday, December 13th. You may also watch it from home for free with ArteKino during the entire month of December – just click here for more information.

The Return

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The plight of Koreans adopted by foreigners who take them far away from the land of their birth is the subject of this Danish-Korean co-production, the first feature by Malene Choi. It’s basically in English, with parts in Danish (with English subtitles) and parts in Korean (with no subtitles, that language not being spoken by the film’s Korean-born, Danish-bred characters).

It all starts with strange, disconcerting electronic sounds and equally unsettling images such as a person disappearing through a door which closes behind them, the shot trimmed in such a way as to leave almost none of the frames of the disappearing person in the shot. Or a woman, who we’ll later discover to be Karoline (Karoline Sofie Lee), viewed from behind as she trudges through lower leg deep mud on a beach (an image which, by accident or design, reminded me of the similarly apocalyptic image towards the start of fellow Dane Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011).

Karoline has left the Denmark she knows from her upbringing to travel to South Korea where she was born to try and find her birth parents. She checks in to a hostel which functions as a temporary base for birth Koreans adopted in other countries trying to track down their parents. She bonds with Thomas (Thomas Hwan) who, like her, was adopted by Danish parents.

Thomas, who is not new to this process as Karoline is, advises her after a frustrating visit to a Holt International Children’s Services (HICS) office where a lady who works there gives Karoline the runaround. It’s not clear whether the lady hasn’t checked hospital records because, as she claims, such records are rarely kept, or because she can’t be bothered, or because it’s somehow against some unwritten law of Korean culture to ask for such things.

Whatever, our female protagonist finds the whole experience frustrating, even harrowing. Thomas advises her that people who threaten such functionaries with their refusal to leave often get told the information they seek. Interestingly, the charity employee is a real life one, the scene staged presumably with her not being told the two actors were actors so that she would treat them like real life adoptees.

This brings us to a fascinating aspect of the film. Its director and many of its actors, including the two leads, are Korean adoptees to other countries (Denmark in the case of the director and her two leads). The script was based on Choi’s own experiences searching for her Korean birth parents. She then encouraged her cast to improvise, drawing on their own experiences of their searches for their families. Serial vox pops with one young woman feel like she’s recounting her own personal experiences. You feel like you’re watching documentary and fiction rolled into one – a most unsettling experience…and yet it works.

Thomas has considerably more luck with his own search and takes Karoline along to meet his mother. In a remarkable single shot scene, son and mother communicate on a very deep level eating a meal she has prepared, despite not sharing the same verbal language and without anything so clichéd as a hug. The effectiveness of this scene is is down in no small part to the extraordinary performance of the actress playing his mother.

Altogether, this is a remarkable, heartbreaking film likely to resonate with anyone adopted into a foreign culture trying to trace their birth family, or even people adopted without the trauma of being sent abroad.

The Return plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Land of Mine (Under Sandet)

Posted on by victorfraga

A war film should never be pleasant to watch, or convey feelings of grandiosity, pride and nationalism. There is no winner: everyone loses out at such conflicts. Land of Mine is extremely successful at highlighting the pointlessness of WW2 in all of its bizarre territoriality and forged allegiances. You won’t leave the cinema feeling enchanted and elated. Instead you will feel shocked and outraged, which is exactly what a war film should do.

The film starts out with Danish Sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen (Roland Møller) leading surrendered German troops out of the country in May 1945 and beating a few soldiers in the process. You would be forgiven for mistaking him for a Nazi: he speaks German, screams in a way not dissimilar to Hitler and embraces gratuitous and unprovoked violence. It’s almost as if the hitherto humiliated Danish took pleasure in becoming the oppressor, even if it’s just for a little while.

The Sergeant in then allocated to a beach where he has to supervise 14 German teenagers, who’ve been sent in order to clear some of of the 2.2 million mines placed by the German on the Danish coast – more than in any other European country. These boys are cleaning up the mess that their parents made in their neighbours’ garden. They have little understanding of the conflict. They don’t dream of world domination and instead just long for a job as mechanic upon their return home. But obviously not all of them will survive the ordeal. They are a testament that the Germans may have been prepared to go to war, but they were never prepared to lose the war.

No slippery fingers, shaky hands, hesitant thoughts and vacillating minds are allowed; the consequences of any minor error are obviously disastrous, ranging from severe mutilation to a horrific death. And so these untrained and emotionally immature boys begin to die, one by one. The Danish filmmaker Martin Zanvliet opted to show just one violent and gory death, which is extremely graphic and disturbing in its realism. It does the job of shell shocking viewers extremely well. But because there is no repetition, the violence is never fetishised and exploitative.

At war, there is no room solidarity and compassion, particularly towards the enemy. The sentiments that are the very foundation of our humanity become subversive. This explains why Sergeant Paul exhibits no sympathy for the young boys. He’s at ease in his sadistic skin, and grapples uncomfortably with the feelings of kindness and altruism. But Land of Mine has a very nice surprise in store for you at the very end.

Land of Mine isn’t the only WW2 movie set on an European beach and showing in UK cinemas right now. You can watch the far more celebratory and momentous Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017) in movie theatres across the UK. Land on Mine is out on Friday, August 11th.