Thomas Vinterberg is the guest of honor at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival where, this evening, he hosted a screening of his second feature Festen.
Directed by Vinterberg from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mogens Rukov, Festen debuted 26-year-ago in Cannes and famously launched, along with Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, the avant-garde Dogme 95 film movement.
“It was like a strike of enlightenment,” Vinterberg said of the launch of Dogme, which called on filmmakers to discard the modern trinkets of contemporary filmmaking for a stripped-back, traditional approach to cinema. The Danish filmmaker was in conversation with Göteborg festival head Pia Lundberg.
However, Vinterberg said the journey to being accepted as a Dogme filmmaker wasn’t as smooth as the legend has it.
“It felt almost like a suicide mission. People were calling me before the success of Festen warning me that it could destroy my career. That it’s going to be the end and Lars was manipulating me,” Vinterberg said of the time. “Even the headmaster of my film school wrote an article in the newspaper about what a bad idea it was.”
Despite all the public discourse about Festen and the Dogme philosophy, the film was the talk of Cannes in 1998 and won the Jury Prize. Dogme was then immediatley synonymous with a new and energetic culture coming out of Denmark.
“It went from being a revolt to being fashion,” Vinterberg said. “Suddenly you could buy Dogme furniture in Denmark, and there was a Dogme grocery box that you could have sent. And it became a ticket to a film festival. So the danger and courage which was so important to what we did was gone. Therefore, for us, Dogme was over the minute it started. But it still was inspirational for an incredible amount of filmmakers all over the world. In that regard, it was no longer about us, and that was fine.”
Despite the crossover success of Festen and his later features like the Oscar-nominated The Hunt and the Oscar-winning Another Round, Vinterberg later during the Q&A named his little-known fourth feature It’s All About Love as his favorite from his filmography.
The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, and Sean Penn. It bombed at the box office and was savaged by critics. Vinterberg said it was a “dysfunctional” film but was ultimately misunderstood by audiences.
“I consider it my trouble child because it fails socially. It was a catastrophe,” he said. “But I thought it was a disorienting yet poetic film. I understand why people don’t understand it. But I love it.”
Vinterberg is coming off the rollout of his first TV series. Families like Ours, a seven-part drama about climate change, debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival before airing on TV 2 in Denmark. The show is nominated for the Nordic Series Script Award, the winner of which will be announced this evening in Göteborg.
Vinterberg described the process of making a series as long but fulfilling. The filmmaker will return to the series format for his next project, an adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s The Brothers Lionheart.
“It’s such a precious book, as I’ve said earlier, it replaced the Bible in my home as it did in many Scandinavian and German homes,” Vinterberg said of the book.
Vinterberg is directing the series for indie studio Media Res (The Morning Show), which has just opened up offices in Sweden. He is co-writing the screenplays with the Tony and Olivier Award playwright Simon Stephens (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). Both will serve as executive producers, alongside Michael Ellenberg, Lars Blomgren, and Lindsey Springer of Media Res, as well as The Astrid Lindgren Company.
Göteborg Film Festival runs until Feb 2.
