[SOUND]. Neither of Lukas Moodysson's global films have reached the same big audience in Sweden or abroad as his first films. This illustrates a problem sometimes connected with making more international films and losing your national base. But it also illustrates that some art films and more experimental films, of course, cannot reach a mass audience. The contemporary Scandinavian art cinema director par excellence, Lars von Trier, has lost a large part of his national audience. But he has managed to get a rather huge international art cinema audience for most of his films. But the story of Scandinavian art cinema is also a story of films that break with mainstream film language and therefore become too strange and demanding for a big audience. The career of Danish Thomas Vinterberg illustrates some of those problems. His dogma film Festen, or The Celebration, was a major international success with 2.8 million tickets in Europe alone, hereof, 405,000 in Denmark. Festen is a low budget dogma film but a high tension drama and a strong realist film about the devastating consequences of family incest. But it is also a film with a much broader symbolic meaning. The story is a story also about the darker sides of the Scandinavian welfare society, of hidden social patterns, lack of solidarity toward strangers and others. It is the film that uncovers hidden social and psychological patterns in a very powerful way. And it spoke directly to both a Scandinavian and broader European audience >> You didn't say that, get it? Go back and get them you've got two hours. Take the car. >> Stop this shit, Michael. >> I can't see my dad in socks. >> You expect me to go home now? What would your mother and father say? >> I can't go to dinner in these shoes! Are you insane? >> You could just pack your own stuff! I've packed for you, me, and the kids. And you want everything to be just so. If you don't like it, pack your own shit! >> [NOISE] I've got fucking news for you! You're the one who does the packing! And every single time you lose my shoes! >> The film won the jury prize in Cannes and became a major international breakthrough for him. But his success also became a cross for him to wear. And in the years to follow, his attempts to make international films were no success. It's All About Love, from 2002, is an experimental science fiction story with stars like Joaquin Phoenix and Clare Danes and with broad, international financing. But, despite this, the film was only seen worldwide by 168,000 people. With his latest films, Submarino from 2010 and The Hunt from 2012, Thomas Vinterberg has returned to Scandinavian productions and to social issues and strong realism. Submarino is a portrait of two brothers with a family background with drug abusing parents. And the film received Nordic films prize in 2010. The Hunt received three prizes in Cannes that year. But more importantly, the film gave Vinterberg a Danish and Scandinavian success for the first time in many years. >> Please tell him what you said about the heart. >> I didn't say anything. >> Is Grethe just making this up? Or did you make it up? >> No. >> Alright. Then try telling it to me. >> It's okay to say it. >> Is it true that you said. That you had seen Lucas' willie? >> If we look at the Nordic film prizes since 2002, it seems that social drama and realism is in high regard in Scandinavia. Not just with the professional critics, but also with the audience. The first film to ever win the prize was Aki Kaurismaki's Finnish film, The Man Without a Past from 2002. It is a symbolic story of human compassion and solidarity among the poor in a container village. A film that combines everyday realism with poetry. Also this film won prizes in Cannes, and it was seen by 2.3 million in Europe. The winner in 2005 was Per Fly's social and political drama, Manslaughter. And the 2006 winner, the Swedish Josef Fares' Zozo, was a drama about migration from Lebanon to Sweden based on the director's own story. And Danish Peter Schonau Fog won the prize in 2007 with the film about a dysfunctional family in provincial Denmark. The only exceptions from this rule of drama and realism are Swedish Roy Anderson's You, the Living from 2008 and Lars Von Trier's Antichrist from 2009. Both these films use a much more experimental and symbolic film language. They are part of the more experimental Scandinavian art cinema tradition. Social drama and realism have a prominent position in contemporary Scandinavian art cinema but there are other tendencies. In the new Norwegian cinema, we find different tendencies in the works of Bent Hamer, Hans Peter Moland, Erik Poppe, and Joachim Trier. Hamer, for instance, makes surreal character-driven comedies which often deal with national and social stereotypes. His most popular film, Kitchen Stories from 2003 exposes social roles in everyday life in Sweden in the 1950s and plays on Swedish/Norwegian differences and stereotypes. His American film, Factotum with Matt Dillon as the bohemian author Charles Bukowski, however, became a bit too strange for a broad audience. Hans Petter Moland doesn't have a large audience outside Norway, but his films are intense psychological films about men. In, for instance, A Somewhat Gentleman from 2010, he develops a kind of black comedy with references to American film noir. The manuscript by Danish Kim Fupz Aakeson shows inspiration from both Jim Jarmusch and Kaurismaki. And Stellan Skarsgard is tough as the released murderer. [MUSIC] Yes. [MUSIC] >> [FOREIGN] >> Yes. >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> In both the films of Erik Poppe and Joachim Trier we find experiments with narrative formats. The films in Erik Poppe's so-called Oslo Trilogy, Schpaa from 1998, Hawai, Oslo from 2004, and Troubled Water from 2008, are all complicated multi-plot stories following a group of people under different circumstances. Immigrants in Oslo, stories of love or the relation between tragic incidents and sorrow. Joachim Trier used contrasting stories and characters in his debut film Reprise from 2006, about two young men with a very different life story. The film uses a modernistic film form, and breaks with normal causality and narrative structure. >> [APPLAUSE] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN] [MUSIC] In hist latest film, Oslo, August 31, from 2011, we follow one character during one day, but during that day he relives his whole past. In the film Oslo and its different neighborhoods are as central to the film narrative as the main character. The generation of filmmakers in Scandinavia after 1990 represent an art cinema with roots in European cinema dedicated to drama and forms of realism with episodic and classic forms of narrative. But we also find more experimental forms of cinema. We find directors in this generation that play openly with mainstream genres. A director like Danish, Nicholas Winding Refn, for instance, made one of the first gangster movies in contemporary Danish cinema. The Pusher Trilogy from 1996 to 2005, with a violent portrait of the Copenhagen underworld and the war between immigrant gangs and other groups. With his US film Drive from 2011, he went international with an action drama with Ryan Gosling in the lead as a semi criminal getaway driver. We see similar tendencies to combine drama and mainstream sorrows in Danish Ole Bornedal's films. For instance the horror film The Nightwatch from 1994, made in an American version from 1998, or his rather more sophisticated thriller, Just Another Love Story. Here a meta level challenged the mainstream reading and experience of the film. [MUSIC]
