20th Annual European Union Film Festival
Screening Dates
  • December 4, 2017 6:30
Denmark

“Vinterberg captures family dysfunction like no other … As its lingering emotional impact attests, the film’s simplicities are quite deceptive.”

Laura Kern, Film Comment

The latest acerbic work from eminent Danish auteur and Dogme 95 vet Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration, The Hunt) is a biting, bittersweet—and semi-autobiographical—“family” drama about a taboo-free commune in 1970s Copenhagen. Trine Dyrholm (In a Better World, A Royal Affair) won Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for her portrayal of Anna, a TV newscaster whose husband (Ulrich Thomsen), a university professor, inherits his father’s sizable home when the family patriarch dies. Seen by Anna as an opportunity to stave off middle-age ennui, they decide to experiment in communal living—all the rage in ​‘70s Scandinavia—with a motley crew of bohemian friends and acquaintances, sending their marriage into freefall.