Festen = Celebration

The first film made by the Dogme 95 Collective. Formed in Denmark in 1995, Dogme is an international group of filmmakers committed to an independent film practice that wishes to see cinema become again an innovative, experimental and politically subversive art. Whatever the controversy the Dogme 95 Manifesto has generated, what is undoubted is the artistic success of “Festen”. Filmed on digital video, in natural light and in natural sound, the simple narrative describes the arrival to a manor house of an extended bourgeois family coming to celebrate the patriarch’s 60th birthday. But his three surviving children come to the celebration with widely ambivalent emotions: one son has arrived to mourn the suicide of his twin, the remaining daughter has to deal with the family’s silent rejection of her black boyfriend, and the eldest brother is locked in a vicious cycle of self-hate, violence and alcoholism. Sitting down together - children, cousins, grandchildren - the patriarch’s youngest son rises and asks his father to choose from two speeches he has prepared. What follows is a weekend of chaos and betrayal where the family is torn apart by secrets long denied. But “Festen” is not only a film about the lies within one family. With brutal precision it juxtaposes the hypocrisy and exploitive relations of the nuclear family with the subjugation and inequalities of contemporary European class society. Exhausting and exhilarating, “Festen” is an examination of a society on the brink of collapse, paradoxically both detached and passionate in its study of the logical excesses of capitalist materialism. There are no special effects in “Festen”, no occult creatures from outer space, but before its resolution the audience has become implicated in a horror that is truly monstrous, has come face to face with an evil that we would like to believe is alien but we recognise as all too familiar. (Awards: Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1998 Cannes Festival) Cast includes Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Birthe Neumann, Paprika Steen, Trine Dyrholm and Helle Dolers. In Danish with English subtitles.