Offscreen on the big screen
by Annika Pham
The new daring and experimental film by Christoffer Bo, selected among the 12 films to screen at Venice Days in a few weeks, is hitting Danish screens today through SF Film and will undoubtedly raise strong controversy because of its totally different cinematic concept.
An innovative format that perfectly fit the Danish Film Institute’s New Danish Screen production scheme, which for the third time is bringing its eccentric offspring under the spotlight of a major international festival after Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Soap [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lars Bredo Rahbek
interview: Pernille Fischer Christensen
film profile], a double award-winner at the last Berlin Film Festival, and Anders Morgenthaler’s Princess [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], shown at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes last May.
Offscreen [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is a film experiment written and directed by Christoffer Boe and his friend, actor Nicolas Bro. Halfway between a feature and a documentary, reality and fiction, the film features Bro in the lead and behind the small digital video camera, in the part of a man making a film about himself. Bro films everything, which drives his wife Lene and friends totally nuts, and when Lene finally calls it quits and moves to Berlin, Nicolas – driven by the thought of getting her back and filming the entire process – begins an inevitable descent into disintegration. The camera sees everything, a silent witness that turns into an enemy.
Offscreen was made for a micro budget of €530,000 with no script – just the general idea that was then filmed by the actors themselves – and a crew stripped down to the bare minimum.
This is the second film produced by Boe’s Alphaville Pictures Copenhagen, set up with Tine Grew Pfeiffer in 2003. Both graduates of the National Film School of Denmark started their collaboration on Boe’s first feature Reconstruction, winner of a Camera d’Or in Cannes 2003. Their second film together Allegro [+see also:
trailer
film profile] – and the first produced for Alphaville – was selected for Venice Days in 2005.
Offscreen is sold internationally by Alphaville Pictures Copenhagen.
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