17/09/2013 - Danish director Christoffer Boe’s first mainstream movie registered 216,000 admissions in two weeks – or almost three times as many as his first five films

Danish director Christoffer Boe’s first movie for mainstream audiences, Sex, Drugs and Taxation, has since its local 60-screen premiere on August 29 registered 216,000 admissions or almost three times as many as his first five films, including the Reconstruction (2003) debut, which took 48,000 and won him the Camera d’Or in Cannes.

“In competition with an Indian Summer, the film has been the No 1 and best-selling release in the Danish cinemas in the last two weeks – it has become a big attraction across the country and is likely to reach 400,000,” said managing director Jan Lehmann, of Nordisk Film Biograf Distribution.

Set between 1965-1984, and scripted by Boe and Simon Pasternak, Sex, Drugs and Taxation depicts the friendship between two of Denmark’s most colourful characters of recent times, Simon Spies – the king of charter travel – and Mogens Glistrup, a lawyer who fought income tax and instigated the Progress Party, which became the second largest in Parliament after a landslide election.

Top-gifted eccentric, Spies, a hedonist capitalist, and Glistrup, a radical libertarian, had their ups-and-downs – at one point Glistrup went to prison – but they left distinct footprints on Danish life for several decades. Pilou Asbæk and Nicolas Bro play the leads in a cast with ao Trine Pallesen and Jesper Christensen.

Produced by Tine Grew Pfeiffer and Caroline Schlüter Bingestam for Alphaville Pictures, Sex, Drugs and Taxation had its international premiere in the Vanguard sidebar of the Toronto International Film Festival (September 5-15). It has also been selected for the Reykjavik International Film Festival (September 26-October 6) and Filmfest Hamburg (September 26-October 5).