Det som ingen ved

Sick of the TV-tinsel-Christmas and with WiseKid and WiseGrandkid not coming until tomorrow, we opted for a film before the midnight service on Christmas Eve. We settled on the Danish filmmaker Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Det som ingen ved (German: Was niemand weiß, English: What no one knows). The subtitle is "Vem kan du egentligen lita på?" (Whom can you trust?) It doesn't appear to have been shown in the States, probably put on a blacklist by the NSA.

I remember seeing it about 5 years ago (make that 2008) at the Nordic Film Festival, but I didn't remember the plot. Scenes began reappearing in my mind, and I remember some of the things I thought while watching the movie. "There's no one watching all those surveillance videos, they are just there to scare off thieves." "There can't be such a secret organization that knows how to kill people and is willing and able to do so just to keep their group secret." "The Danish government would never work hand in hand with the CIA like that."

Post-Snowden: It's worse than this. This film is sugar-coated, rose-colored glasses, just hinting at what we now know to be true. Truly amazing that the Danish Department of Defense (Forsvarskommandoen) let them film on location.

Yes, there are loose ends here and there: Thomas keeps coming up with cars that shouldn't be there, maps to hidden cabins appear by magic, Stockholm is just a short drive from Malmö. But still, the film should be revived, if only to make you ask some questions: What are all these cameras for? Why are they watching us? What is it, that they don't want us to know?

The Hunt

Berlin is a wonderful town for film-lovers! I mean, where can you go see a foreign film in the original language the same week it opens in German in the normal theaters? In the Hackische Höfe there is a theater (up about 4 flights of stairs and no elevator) that was showing Jagten, The Hunt, in Danish with subtitles. So when the decision was between Kon-Tiki and The Hunt, we chose the Hunt, on the theory that Kon-Tiki will still be playing in a few weeks.

We are probably right. Even though the film is on a very serious subject - a male kindergarten teacher is suspected of "doing something" to one of the children, and the whole thing escalates to the entire village being violent against the teacher (who loses his job), even though he didn't do anything. It shows the very fine line that one walks as a male who enjoys playing with children in this hyperreactive world.

The twisted ending after the village quickly forgives him when the girl makes it clear that she was just making everything up is not believable. It rather has the feel of having been cobbled together to get the film over with somehow. It is unsettling to see how whispers and believing the worst of someone can quickly serve to do them grave injustice.

And in a way, as one review has put it, quite an anti-feminism film, as it is the women who are all behaving so irrationally, blaming the man. This is far too black&white, although there are certainly women who would behave exactly as some of the women in the movie.

Not a movie for a fun evening, and not enough food for thought on this quite grave subject. Nice Danish, though, although much of the scenery seems to be more Swedish than Danish.

Nordic Film Festival 2010

And the other films I saw at the Nordic Film Festival 2010:

• Run Sister Run
  Finnish film about two teenage girls - one good, one bad. The good one turns bad, the two of them raise hell, and then the good one turns good again. 
• Caspar and the Forbidden Movie
  Finnish director Caspar Wrede made a film in 1970 about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich". The world was happy to see it when Solzhenitsyn got the Nobel Peace Prize, but Finland got its knickers in a knot about it and banned it. When the Swedes showed it on TV they cut the power to the senders located on the Aaland Islands so no one could watch. Caspar got mad and returned to the theater. In 1996 (!) the Finns finally resented and broadcast it on TV.
• But Film Is My Mistress
  Another Ingmar Bergmann retrospektive. Reuses bits from other documentaries. Nothing new to see here, move along.
• Beyond
  This one won the festival prize, although I was sick of yet-another-alcoholic-parent and dysfunctional-family. Noomi Rapace proves that she plays the same character in all movies - it was great in the Millenium trilogy, but rather tiring in a different setting. She does have good taste in men, however - her real-life husband Ola Rapace plays her husband in the film, and he sure is good-looking!
• The Place
  An Icelandic youth gets put in jail by mistake, is brutalized, gets saved by his girlfriend.
• The Trainer
  Jens Albinus, the actor who plays the Eagle in that wonderful Danish cop series, is a handball trainer. His goalie suspects that the trainer has jerked him off while he was drunk. Did he or didn't he?
• Dreamland
  This time it is not people getting raped, but the Icelandic countryside, ravished to produce electricity that is consumed by aluminum plants to produce all those cans the Americans pitch after having a cola or a beer. Interesting documentary.

I would have liked to see more, but there was no time. Maybe next year!

Smilla's Sense of Snow

Okay, okay. Smilla's Sense of Snow is a Danish film by Bille August from 1997. I did read the book by Peter Høeg when it was published, though!

It was on TV last night, we taped it and watched it this evening. Smilla, a woman living in Copenhagen who is half Greenlander is unhappy. When a neighbor boy dies in a strange accident, she does not believe that it was an accident, but murder. Many of the problems of the Greenlanders are portrayed in various details around the main story.

And of course, it is a conspiracy that takes her on a ship to Greenland, land of majestic mountains of ice, where she finally discovers the truth.

No, this is not a major suspense-packed thriller, although there are lots of deaths littering the way. It is subtle, light, like a dusting of snow. And even though it is clear to me that the explosion at the end did not start all the icebergs breaking off, the footage is so dramatic and worth watching.

Much better than the soccer game on afterwards, but with the current state of German soccer that is not saying much.

What No One Knows / Det som ingen ved

Shaken, slightly disoriented, keenly aware of the the video surveillance cameras all around me, I leave the Zoo Palast. It is Berlinale and I was in the not-quite-sold-out world premiere of Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's new film "Det som ingen ved" (What No One Knows).

The Danish co-founder of Dogma95 has woven three films into one thick braid: a spy story based on the book "En Anden Tid" (A Second Time) by Søren Lassen (who, according to blog rumor, got to be an extra on the set), your typical Danish family drama, and an unsettling demonstration of Big Brother watching you. The film is interspersed with short cuts in black and white of cameras and of the pictures they are taking. They are everywhere, you can't get away.

When Thomas complains to Ursula about this she asks him if he has been living in a cave or what the past half a year. They are put up to fight druggies and crime and "terrorists". She taunts: "But now that they are being used against you, you don't like them. Or were you a bad boy, Thomas, were you a bad boy?"

Back to the story: A nice, Danish family dinner gets traditionally interrupted by bad news, Marianne wants to divorce Thomas. Thomas gets drunk, meets briefly with his sister in the garden. She has something important to tell him, someone she wants him to meet, but she won't tell him because he is drunk. She tells him to be at the cold baths in Ribersborg across the bridge in Sweden tomorrow night. When he arrives, she has disappeared and is found drowned with a nasty bash on the head.

He finds papers in her apartment about bioterrorism, and of course the Danish Secret Service and the Secret Secret Service called Tyrfing after a magic sword, and the CIA and and and. Anyway, he joins up with Ursula to try and sort this out, and she admonishes him to make sure that he is not being followed.

Suddenly they are everywhere. Suspicious people who could be spies. Cameras. Hidden microphones. More cameras. More suspicious people. Who can you trust? Enough of them do scare him, hurt him or his family. Who will be next?

The braid comes together for some sort of happy end, only to have another pesky camera taking pictures again. As the credits roll we have throbbing music and pictures of cameras and microphones flashing by, beating to the rhythm of the music. I feel that my heart is following this rhythm and the cameras are boring themselves into my eyes. They are everywhere.

And so they are on my way home. They are everywhere. I know, I don't like it, but I don't protest enough. I seriously consider wearing a Tschador, that would hide me, but it might be a tad to conspicuous, even in Berlin, for me to show up to work in one.

An eerie feeling of being watched still surrounds me, hours later, even as I write these lines. A masterful film, not scheduled for release in Denmark until this summer, for whatever reason I do not know. I hope it wins a bear - preferably gold.

De fem benspænd

The Five Obstructions
DK 2003, R: Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier, OmU, 90’

The German Historical Museum in Berlin has a movie theater - a rather brilliant one at that. Lots of leg room (but uncomfortably cushion seats), only 5 Euros a shot and no advertising. Of course, they aren't showing the newest Disney blockbuster, but all sorts of historical or arty films.

This is an *arty* arty film. The Danish filmmaker I can't stand, Lars von Trier, commands the older, well-known Jørgen Leth to recreate one of his first films, The Perfect Human (1967) - but with different obstructions each time. von Trier is his normal, sadistic self, pushing Leth further and further. Leth, master film-maker that his is, arises to each of the challenges.

The first is done in a country he has never been in, the second in a red-light district in Bombay, filming him eating while a crowd of hungry Indians is held back by a transparent screen. The third is done in Brüssels in split-screen, for the fourth he has to make it an animation - something both he and von Trier hate - and in the fifth he has to make the movie to the tape of him (Leth) reading a text that von Trier wrote. He may only read once, without practice.

Leth is an observer. The details are so important to every frame of this documentary (for which Leth is also the director). And the sadistic twists added by von Trier - for examlpe, Leth acting in a film about him directing a film about himself recreating a film he previously did - just boggle the mind.

I liked the film - but I still don't like von Trier.