Серия "Nordic Film Classics"

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (�The Celebration�) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity � no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director, and only handheld cameras for equipment � Festen was a commercial and critical success, winning the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998 and garnering worldwide attention.The film is set at the sixtieth birthday party...

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson�s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The �songs� of the film�s title refer to Andersson�s artistic ruminations on the state of mankind from his office on the second floor of Studio 24 in Stockholm. The film presents a series of forty-six tableaux�long, deep-focus shots...

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in Sweden, Lilya 4-Ever (2002), debuted as a writer and director while still in his twenties with Show Me Love (1998). The film received four Guldbaggar–the Swedish equivalent of the Academy Awards–including best film, best director, best screenplay, and best...

Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Entitled Italiensk for begyndere (Italian for Beginners), Scherfig's Dogme film transformed this already accomplished filmmaker into one of Europe's most noteworthy women directors. Danish and international critics lavished praise...

Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film The Silence was made at a point in his career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable to censorship boards in Sweden and the United States. The film's depiction of sexuality was, as Judith Crist wrote at the time in the New York Herald-Tribune, «not for the prudish.» Yet Bergman's notebooks and screenplays reveal his tendency for self-censorship, both to dampen the literary...

Dagur Kari�s Noi the Albino (Noi albinoi, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Bjorn Nordfjord�s examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of...