Balcony Tales
Helle Windeløv-Lidzélius
The crumbling balconies of Havana as the inhabitants’ faithful friends and centres of social life. Hawkers, gossip, neighbourly help and magic.
D
Film Archive
- All
Balcony Tales
Documentary Film
Cuba,
Denmark
2013
36 minutes
Subtitles:
English
Credits
Producer
Ellen Riis
Director
Helle Windeløv-Lidzélius
Music
Christian Schrøder, Max Bering, Peter Johansson, Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius
Cinematographer
Adam Morris Philp, Denis Guerra Ribas, Rocío Aballí Hernández
Editor
Mette Esmark, Nanna Frank Møller
Script
Helle Windeløv-Lidzélius, Janis Reyes Hernández
Sound
Niels Arild
Everybody in the city of Havana knows that it’s better to walk in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk, where you may be hit by a crumbling balcony. Still: the balcony is a loyal friend, connecting people with their neighbours, the hawkers, the noise and smell of the street. Ceci has spent his whole life here. Now he is old and blind, but not alone. He has his balcony, from which he shops, hears important news and calls for Edilia, a young woman from the opposite side of the street who takes care of him like a daughter. This warm-hearted, unspectacular relationship forms the framework for a filmic declaration of love to the balconies of Havana. Each of them has their own story, their own soul and magic. It’s a bitter thing for anyone not to have one, for then you are cut off from life, which displays the full panorama of human diversity only to the viewer from above.
Matthias Heeder
Matthias Heeder
Dance For Me
Katerine Philp
The teenagers Yegor and Mie are on their way to the international elite of Latin-American dancing. Glamour – and homesickness, sweat, pain, deprivations. What’s your dream worth to you?
Dance For Me
Credits
Producer
Lise Saxtrup
Director
Katerine Philp
Music
Uno Helmersson
Cinematographer
Sophia Olsson, Niels Thastum, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen
Editor
Signe Rebekka Kaufmann
Script
Katrine Philp
Rumba, Jive, and Paso doble. Everything in Mie’s and Yegor’s life revolves around dancing. The two teenagers are professional Latin American ballroom dancers and one hundred percent dedicated to being among the best one day and becoming unforgettable legends of the dance floor. Their circumstances of life, however, are anything but ordinary. Denmark, a country with a great dance tradition and ambitious dance schools, has an obvious problem with lack of young talents in this field. Russian Yegor, who came to Denmark as a teenager, lives with his dance partner’s family. His welfare and continued residence in the country depend entirely on his athletic success.
At first the two seem like the perfect couple on the dance floor. But Yegor is struggling with homesickness and has great difficulties finding his way around the new environment, language and culture. Mie in turn is suffering from Yegor’s taciturnity and the distance between the two begins to emerge in training sessions and performances. After a while they find a way to open up to each other and understand what it really means to dance as a couple. Katrine Philp paints a highly sensitive portrait of an unusual family and work relationship, capturing the highly artificial and styled world of ballroom dancing in aesthetic images.
Lina Dinkla
At first the two seem like the perfect couple on the dance floor. But Yegor is struggling with homesickness and has great difficulties finding his way around the new environment, language and culture. Mie in turn is suffering from Yegor’s taciturnity and the distance between the two begins to emerge in training sessions and performances. After a while they find a way to open up to each other and understand what it really means to dance as a couple. Katrine Philp paints a highly sensitive portrait of an unusual family and work relationship, capturing the highly artificial and styled world of ballroom dancing in aesthetic images.
Lina Dinkla
Doel
Frederik Sølberg
A visit to a ghost town that’s anything but deserted: old timers, tuners and adventure tourists form an unusual community that keeps the town alive.
Doel
Documentary Film
Belgium,
Denmark
2018
67 minutes
Subtitles:
English
Credits
Producer
Mathilde Hvid Lippmann, Frederik Sølberg
Director
Frederik Sølberg
Music
Anders Rhedin, Anders Bertram Mannov, Lavvi Ebbel
Cinematographer
Jonathan Wannyn
Editor
Mads Hedegaard
Script
Frederik Sølberg
Sound
Andreas Sandborg, Neal Willaert
24 Cafés and three bakeries, a ferry, a butcher’s shop and a supermarket. That was Doel in its heyday. Today the city has a reputation as an adventure park for adults. Illegal car racing and techno raves fill the streets by night, during the day tourists in mini-buses debate whether graffiti are a form of art or just a sign of the decline (of manners). In his portrait of Doel, however, Frederik Sølberg doesn’t film the abandoned houses on the background of Antwerp’s expanding harbour but focuses on the people who have remained in their hometown. Some in defiance of the constraints of the situation, others because they see a chance to open up new spaces for themselves here.
Sølberg’s warm-hearted observations of the residents raise the question of the right to a home. Where is the people’s place when globalisation gobbles up their traditional spaces? The community of old and young people fight the dilapidation of the houses with gallows humour and an awareness of their curious situation. They aren’t ready yet to give up their home. Sølberg manages to capture the points of intersection between the residents, adventure tourists and the tuning scene, who share this place without really meeting.
Marie-Thérèse Antony
Sølberg’s warm-hearted observations of the residents raise the question of the right to a home. Where is the people’s place when globalisation gobbles up their traditional spaces? The community of old and young people fight the dilapidation of the houses with gallows humour and an awareness of their curious situation. They aren’t ready yet to give up their home. Sølberg manages to capture the points of intersection between the residents, adventure tourists and the tuning scene, who share this place without really meeting.
Marie-Thérèse Antony
Jazz That Nobody Asked For
Rune Fisker, Esben Fisker
A young man is clearing out his departed fathers’ estate. Among his belongings he finds a box with a most peculiar content ...
Jazz That Nobody Asked For
Credits
Producer
Esben Fisker
Director
Rune Fisker, Esben Fisker
Animation
Pawel Binczycki, Rune Fisker, Esben Fisker
Script
Rune Fisker, Esben Fisker
Sound
Pawel Binczycki
A young man is clearing out his departed fathers’ estate. Among his belongings he finds a box with a most peculiar content: a jazz band! They start to follow him wherever he goes. What a nightmare!
Miniyamba – Walking Blues
Luc Perez
Every day thousands of people across the globe leave their homes. One day, Abdu from Mali joins them – Europe glitters in the distance ...
Miniyamba – Walking Blues
Animated Film
Denmark,
France
2012
14 minutes
Subtitles:
English
Credits
Producer
Vibeke Windeløv
Director
Luc Perez
Music
Moussa Diallo, Yann Coppier
Cinematographer
Luc Perez
Editor
Luc Perez
Animation
Luc Perez
Script
Michel Fessler, Luc Perez
Sound
Yann Coppier
Every day thousands of people across the globe leave their homes. One day, Abdu from Mali joins them – Europe glitters in the distance. On his odyssey from the River Niger to the barbed wire of the Spanish refugee camp of Ceuta the young man encounters some harsh realities. How many of his dreams could possibly survive?
Credits
Producer
The Animation Workshop
Director
Soetkin Verstegen
Sound
Andrea Martignoni
The audience panicked when they saw the first moving images of a train arriving at a station. Pure immersive cinema. In her ingenious kaleidoscope, Belgian artist Soetkin Verstegen employs analogue animation film techniques to arrange reminiscences to early cinema as a world that enthralled audiences through fear, thrills and delight. Her tribute goes back to the horror stories, to the circus and the showmen who played their part in the invention of a cinema that may soon be gone.
Cornelia Klauß
Cornelia Klauß
Pervert Park
Frida Barkfors, Lasse Barkfors
A social project in Florida where sex offenders live after being released from prison. Distressing life stories that call the term “pervert” into question.
Pervert Park
Credits
Producer
Frida Barkfors, Anne Köhncke
Director
Frida Barkfors, Lasse Barkfors
Music
Julian Winding
Cinematographer
Lasse Barkfors
Editor
Signe Rebekka Kaufann, Lasse Barkfors
Script
Frida Barkfors, Lasse Barkfors
Sound
Frida Barkfors, Frank Mølgaard Knudsen
Sexual offenses are surely among the most horrible things people can do to each other. There seems to be a broad social consensus on how to deal with the offenders. In the U.S. their photos are posted publicly. When they have served their prison sentence they are not allowed to live near places regularly frequented by children. Only social projects like the one in Florida portrayed by Frida and Lasse Barkfors help them deal with their crimes and find their way back to life. In tranquil images the directors record the daily life of this “gated community”, getting very close to some of the roughly 120 men and women who live there. Harrowing and very different stories unfold in concentrated intimacy, some of them about violence and abuse and a lifelong struggle for dignity and human warmth, some of them the stories of lives thrown off track. They are all about how to deal with one’s crime and how to live with it.
But we also meet people who have been caught in a system that, in a mixture of social hysteria and a profit-oriented legal system, has turned the punishment of alleged sexual offenders into a perfidious business model. This film makes one re-consider the term “pervert”.
Grit Lemke
But we also meet people who have been caught in a system that, in a mixture of social hysteria and a profit-oriented legal system, has turned the punishment of alleged sexual offenders into a perfidious business model. This film makes one re-consider the term “pervert”.
Grit Lemke
Photographer of War
Boris Benjamin Bertram
A portrait of Jan Grarup, passionate war photographer and father of four – a man between great adventures and great responsibility.
Photographer of War
Documentary Film
Denmark
2019
78 minutes
Subtitles:
English
German
Credits
Producer
Katrine A. Sahlstrøm
Director
Boris Benjamin Bertram
Music
Tobias Wilner Bertram
Cinematographer
Tony Lauge Madsen, Adam Philp, Henrik Bohn Ipsen, Marcel Zyskind, Boris Bertram, Thøger Kappel
Editor
Charlotte Munch Bengtsen
Jan Grarup is a photographer with heart and soul. His pictures of war zones have made him famous. But even at home, in his house in Copenhagen, everything is dominated by the medium: “The lens has been in the American Civil War,” Grarup proudly announces when he welcomes the French star philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy for a portrait session. The film by Boris Benjamin Bertram meets Grarup at a moment when everything changes: The woman with whom he has four children has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Grarup, presumably an adventurer rather than a responsible father and partner before, must take care of things now. And when he goes to the frontline against the Islamic State in Iraq, he knows that he must come home safely because he owes it to his children.
Bertram’s film is both intimate and discreet. Jan Grarup opens up; he shows his tattooed body at the doctor or the hotel, he lets the filmmaker share, as much as possible, the daily life of a war photographer. Older, originally private recordings of past family life make the present-day scenes more urgent: Photography (and film) are truly revealed as a medium against death here.
Bert Rebhandl
Bertram’s film is both intimate and discreet. Jan Grarup opens up; he shows his tattooed body at the doctor or the hotel, he lets the filmmaker share, as much as possible, the daily life of a war photographer. Older, originally private recordings of past family life make the present-day scenes more urgent: Photography (and film) are truly revealed as a medium against death here.
Bert Rebhandl
The Agreement
Karen Stokkendal Poulsen
The negotiations for the independence of Kosovo. Two parties, an EU facilitator. A political thriller as a chamber play where even the colour of a tie becomes a tactical detail.
The Agreement
Documentary Film
Denmark
2014
52 minutes
Subtitles:
English
Credits
Producer
Vibeke Vogel
Director
Karen Stokkendal Poulsen
Music
Steffen Breum
Cinematographer
Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, Lars Skree, Marie Billegrav
Editor
Anders Villadsen
Sound
Esa Nissi
How does it look and feel when the status quo of history is challenged? Like a sinister poker game or more like a brightly lit meeting? Will there be casual affability or will the sparks fly? And what about tactics? Had you better sit with your back to the wall or to the window? And how careful must one be about the choice of one’s tie? Danish filmmaker Karen Stokkendal Poulsen wants to know: with immense curiosity and equal reserve she keeps watching the several week long final round of the long negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo in 2012. The goal is to delicately settle a smouldering conflict, or rather: to pave a long-term path towards peaceful coexistence that both sides can take. The complicated dialogue is moderated and hosted by EU facilitator Robert Cooper. The opponents are Edita Tahiri, deputy Minister President of Kosovo, and Borko Stefanović, chief negotiator for Serbia. Each of the three main protagonists acts as the representative of a cause and an individual personality – two sides that do not always merge seamlessly. Precisely speaking, these agents are the key characters of a drama that may rarely leave its main stage, the conference room – but is still more exciting than many a global thriller. Instructive and moving. Direct Cinema at its best!
Ralph Eue
Ralph Eue
What He Did
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
A spectacular murder case: in 1988, Jens killed his boyfriend, a well-known writer. The reconstruction of a fatal amour fou, and questions of guilt and punishment.
What He Did
Credits
Producer
Jesper Jack
Director
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Cinematographer
Nadim Carlsen
Editor
Anders Skov
Animation
Lasse Smith
Script
Jonas Poher Rasmussen
Sound
Martin Dirkov
Crime story or love story? In 1988 Jens Michael Schau killed his life partner and fellow writer Christian Kampmann in the heat of passion. The media picked up the story because Christian was a famous writer in Denmark. Though Jens has long since served his sentence he still hides in his flat like a shy animal for fear of disturbing people by his mere presence. But the time has come for him, too: his story – the one behind the tragedy – must out. Protected by his own four walls Jens starts to engage with the camera, circling it hesitantly, always wary of himself. The director’s cautious questions from off-screen open a gateway to the past: an unconditional love which was also the psychology major’s coming out and the break with his conservative family.
The trip back through time to the liberal homosexual Copenhagen of the 70s and 80s ends in an emotional maelstrom of separation anxiety, jealousy and writer’s envy. Jens’s long overdue return to society plays out on two levels: the words he forces himself to say are reflected in the rehearsals for an autobiographical play. Jonas Poher Rasmussen in turn uses the actors to formulate his own questions about the subject: how can this story be told at all – and how do you live with it?
Lars Meyer
The trip back through time to the liberal homosexual Copenhagen of the 70s and 80s ends in an emotional maelstrom of separation anxiety, jealousy and writer’s envy. Jens’s long overdue return to society plays out on two levels: the words he forces himself to say are reflected in the rehearsals for an autobiographical play. Jonas Poher Rasmussen in turn uses the actors to formulate his own questions about the subject: how can this story be told at all – and how do you live with it?
Lars Meyer
