31/01/2012

Danish director Mads Matthiesen’s feature debut, Teddy Bear [+see also:
trailer
film profile], was last week (January 28) awarded Best Director in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film tells the story of a young man, a bodybuilder who lives alone with his dominating mother; he desperately wants to find true love, and since his uncle has succeeded in Thailand, he travels to Pattaya to find his bride.

In 2008, Matthiesen showed his short, Dennis, at Sundance; same story (without Thailand), same lead, Danish international bodybuilder champion Kim Kold, 140 kilos of muscle, biceps measure 53 cms, can bench press 1,000 kilos. The cast of Teddy Bear includes only one professional actress, Elsebeth Steentoft.

”There's a new trend in Danish films these years,” observed Danish film critic Kim Skotte, of the Politiken. ”With an extreme focus on the realism of the framework, young directors are making features for little money based on what you might call an unofficial dogma of documented fiction.”

"I operate in a fictional universe. What matters is my experience of reality, not actual reality. When you work in documentaries, I think you have an obligation to keep it real - the way reality is,” Matthiesen explained.

A front-runner of the trend was R [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2010), by Danish directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, which swept both the national Bodil and Robert awards – three and eight trophies from each, respectively – and garnered the two filmmakers the Carl Dreyer Prize for their ”uncompromising realism”.

Starring Pilou Asbæk, with extensive use of non-actors, R follows a young inmate (Rune) at the Horsens State Prison, where most of it was filmed. Rune is imprisoned for violent assault and placed in the hardcore ward, where his survival depends on learning a parallel world of honour, hidden agendas and contracts. At Sweden’s Göteborg International Film Festival, it won for Best Nordic Film.