The Scandinavian Film Festival Los Angeles will say “Skål!” to its 11th year for two weekends, Jan. 9-10 and 16-17, at the Writers Guild Theater, 135 S. Doheny (at Wilshire).
Showcasing highlights of recent Nordic cinema from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, the festival includes each country’s Academy Award submission for the Best Foreign Language Film, along with additional current features, and a sampling of shorts and documentaries.
The opening weekend starts with a documentary This Is Hollywood—which chronicles the experiences of two Finnish filmmakers pitching their first screenplay in Hollywood.
Writer-director Klaus Härö from Finland will be on hand to introduce Letters To Father Jacob at 8 p.m. tomorrow following the gala buffet, where can guests mingle and sample drinks and tastes of Scandinavia also offered each day and night along with the films.
• Härö has already earned a following at the Beverly Hills event. His fourth film to be shown at the fest since 2002 (after Elina, Mother Of Mine, and The New Man, all made in conjunction with Sweden) and his third to be submitted in the Best Foreign Film category, the film is as strikingly beautiful as it is quietly intimate.
Set in the Finnish countryside, the seemingly simple story, develops layers of dark personal history and shifting motives in the female protagonist, a woman released from prison on a plea of clemency and sent to live with a blind priest.
Härö was awarded the Ingmar Bergman Prize in 2003, the winner of which was chosen by Bergman himself.
Saturday afternoon a Swedish short The Man With All The Marbles leads into the Swedish Oscar submission Involuntary.
On Sunday evening, Jan. 10, Denmark’s Oscar hopeful Terribly Happy lights up the screen followed by a special reception sponsored by the Danish Embassy.
Icelandic Oscar submission Reykjavik Rottrdan and Norwegian Oscar contender Max Maunus, which is the festival’s closing film, screen the second weekend
• Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s Max Manus, is as much a thriller as it is a World War II biopic on an epic scale.
Made with the biggest budget ever of a film produced entirely by Norway before 2009 and then seen by one-quarter of the country’s population in six weeks, it both celebrates Norway’s freedom fighter of the film’s title and marks the toll of war by following this charismatic saboteur from his volunteering in Finland’s Winter War with Russia, to his training in England, to his organizing a resistance in Stockholm against the Nazi invasion and occupation of Norway. Max Manus is old-style spectacle in grand form.
• Applause is an example of Denmark’s “tradition” of inventive cinema yet returns us to its pre-Dogme days of intense drama, deep character studies, and acting as the emotional core of filmmaking—a style of cinema more reminiscent of America’s John Cassavetes than Denmark’s Lars Von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg.
In fact, Applause offers echoes of Opening Night and actual scenes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as the prolific Paprika Steen, a familiar face at the Scandinavian Film Festival L.A., gives the performance of her life playing an acclaimed actress on the skids who must get herself back together to once again be a mother to her two young sons. It’s a tour de force directed by Martin Zandvliet, a filmmaker to watch for seasons to come.
“We’ve been called the place ‘where Nordic film winters in Southern California,” says festival Founder/Director Jim Koenig. “Our festival offers unique opportunities for explorers as well as devotees of international cinema, European cinema, and Nordic film. There are around 800 films made in Europe each year; 80 of those are from the Nordic countries
As it starts a second decade, the festival offers audiences a chance to compare, contrast, watch talent develop and top talent emerge.
“It’s like watching the cream rise to the top,” says Koenig. “Some of our audience has been watching with us for a decade. For all, there are discoveries to be made. Scandinavian film has a reputation for being dark and somber. But we’ve laughed a lot too, and cried. We go from popcorn to Prozac—from polar to bi-polar. And in the course of heart-strings resonating like a Finnish Kantele, we’ve learned that things can get hot. There’s plenty of steam and it’s not all from a scoop of water on the rocks in a sauna scene. We’ve seen a lot—some entertaining but disposable, some profound and enduring.”
For a complete schedule of films and events and tickets, visit www.scandinavianfilmfestivalla.-com, call 323-661-4273 or send e-mail to filmfest@asfla.org.
