The Danish Directors 3: Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783200413 ISBN 13: 9781783200412

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Following the two previous volumes in this series of practitioner interviews with Danish directors, Danish Directors 3 focuses on Danish documentary cinema. Although many of the directors interviewed here have ventured successfully into the terrain of fiction, their main contributions to the thriving post-80s milieu lie in the interconnected areas of documentary film and television. Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features filmmakers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark's now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term 'new' also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the filmmakers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and, indeed, of the professional environments in which they operate. A comprehensive overview of documentary directors currently working in Denmark, this is the only book of its kind about this growing area of Danish cinema.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ib Bondebjerg is professor of film and media studies and director of the Centre for Modern European Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where Eva Novrup Redvall is assistant professor in the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication. Mette Hjort is professor of visual studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and affiliate professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

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The Danish Directors 3

Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema

By Mette Hjort, Ib Bondebjerg, Eva Novrup Redvall

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-041-2

Contents

Acknowledgements, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1: Phie Ambo, 29, 
Chapter 2: Dola Bonfils, 49, 
Chapter 3: Dorte Høeg Brask, 67, 
Chapter 4: Mads Brügger, 87, 
Chapter 5: Pernille Rose Grønkjær, 107, 
Chapter 6: Jesper Jargil, 125, 
Chapter 7: Torben Skjødt Jensen, 143, 
Chapter 8: Max Kestner, 163, 
Chapter 9: Mikala Krogh, 181, 
Chapter 10: Simone Aaberg Kærn, 205, 
Chapter 11: Asger Leth, 225, 
Chapter 12: Janus Metz, 243, 
Chapter 13: Eva Mulvad, 263, 
Chapter 14: Michael Noer, 283, 
Chapter 15: Katia Forbert Petersen, 303, 
Chapter 16: Jeppe Rønde, 321, 
Chapter 17: Sami Saif, 339, 
Chapter 18: Anne Wivel, 359, 
Chapter 19: Anders Østergaard, 379, 
Glossary, 401, 
Index of Titles and Names, 411, 
Index of the Institutional Landscape and Central Topics, 423, 

CHAPTER 1

Phie Ambo

Born 1973. Phie Ambo holds a BA in Nordic Philology from the University of Copenhagen. She was subsequently trained at the National Film School of Denmark, graduating as a documentary film director in 2003. Phie Ambo released her first documentary film, entitled Family (2001), while still in film school. Co-directed with Sami Saif, Family won the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). The film follows Saif 's trip to the Middle East in search of his father. Like most of Ambo's films, Family was shot in CinemaScope. At the same time, however, the film has much of the intimacy of a documentary diary film. Family was one of the first Danish documentaries to achieve a noteworthy theatrical release. Having graduated from film school, Ambo made Gambler (2005), a thought-provoking account of Nicolas Winding Refn's efforts, against all odds, to complete Pusher 2 (2004) and Pusher 3 (2005). Gambler looks closely at the creative process of Refn's filmmaking, while also documenting the many economic battles in which the director was involved during the production of the second and third films in his trilogy. Ambo's more recent films include Hjemmefronten – fjenden bag hækken (The Home Front, 2010), which looks at the hostility that exists between neighbours who share hedges in suburban Denmark; and Fever (2010), a documentary short about the artist Julie Nord. In recent years, Ambo has been especially interested in pursuing work of a more thematic nature, and this in the form of a trilogy focusing on big existential issues. In Mechanical Love (2007), which travelled widely on the international festival circuit, Ambo explored the relationship between human beings and robots, and the nature of emotion itself. Released in 2012, Free the Mind deals with the impact that thoughts have on both the mind and the body. The last film in the trilogy, Ripples at the Shore, is about consciousness, and is scheduled for release in 2014. Ambo is also working on a film called Kongens Foged ('The Bailiff '), which takes a close look at the social system that shapes Danish realities. Phie Ambo co-owns the production company Danish Documentary with directors Pernille Rose Grønkjær, Mikala Krogh, and Eva Mulvad, and producer Sigrid Dyekjær.

Documentary features:

2014 Bondemand Niels ('Farmer Niels')
2014 Ripples at the Shore (working title)
2012 Kongens Foged ('The Bailiff')
2012 Free the Mind
2010 Fever – En film om Julie Nord (Fever: A Film about Julie Nord)
2007 Mechanical Love
2005 Gambler
2003 The Diver Inside Me (diploma film)
2002 Growing Up in a Day
2001 Family (with Sami Saif)

Television:

2010 Hjemmefronten – Fjenden bag hækken (The Home Front, TV 2)

REDVALL: How did you end up becoming a documentary filmmaker?

AMBO: I'm not one of these people who always wanted to make films. I have a BA in Nordic Philology, but already during my years as a student I started to realize that I had a strong desire to tell stories based on reality. However, I wasn't at all interested in journalistic stories. I wanted my own voice to be included because I was really tired of not being allowed to say 'I' at university. I had a strong need to tell a story that was bloody well told by me! I was eager to put myself on the line, and to tell a story that didn't involve all sorts of references to the work of others. But the question was, 'Where could I do that?'

I'd spent some time in New York, where I'd worked in a restaurant so as to save up for a camera. And what happened when I got it was that I became fascinated by the process of looking through the lens of a camera, where you select the reality you want. You choose to include certain things in the frame, and to exclude others. It's a particular way of understanding the world around us. I've never been interested in fiction. What interests me is the chaos of reality. I used the camera to unlock a kind of code, and what I experienced was that what I excluded from the frame, what my gaze opted not to include, could actually be more important than what was in the frame. I became really fascinated by that, but I still hadn't figured out where I could go with these ideas, where I could develop them. But then someone suggested that I go and see the graduation films from the National Film School's Documentary & TV programme, and that's when I realized what it was I wanted to do. So I actually applied to the Film School without having made a single film.

REDVALL: Why do you think you got in without having made a single film?

AMBO: The head of the programme, Arne Bro, has an eye for quirkiness. He's good at seeing right through whatever it is you think you're projecting. Looking back, I now see that I applied on the basis of a very tough and confrontational piece of creative work, which was probably the sort of thing the School was looking for. What I sent along was an unedited ten-minute sequence documenting a conversation with my father about how he was dying. It was clearly handheld, there was no editing, and it was just on VHS. So what was clear was that I had a certain drive, but also that I didn't know anything about how to make a film. I remember thinking that, if I was going to spend four years of my life at that school, it had to be the sort of place that could accommodate all that. I was really tired of being moulded. And I wanted to be fully in the picture myself, so I really put everything I had into that application. Talking to someone who's dying is a pretty awful thing to do, but I just wasn't going to hold back. And then I got in, and it was such a relief to feel that someone had sensed that there was a kind of expressive form, an expressive language, somewhere in that rough and rather in-your-face material.

REDVALL: Arne Bro appears to be someone who's very important to you, but also to a lot of other documentary filmmakers from your generation. Why is that?

AMBO: Arne has absolutely no artistic scruples. He has no fixed ideas about what can and can't be art. So as a result he's very good at liberating a language. He's extremely psycho-dynamic in his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783200413
• ISBN 13: 9781783200412
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 442
• Herausgeber: Hjort Mette, Bondebjerg Ib, Redvall Eva Novrup
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland