Jon Bang Carlsen

Danish auteur Jon Bang Carlsen takes stock of his life's work, the art of cinema and life itself in a film that stretches from the west coast of Denmark to the red desert sands of Arizona.

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Where does the dream begin and reality end? In Dreaming Arizona, this is the question both for the central figures and for the viewer. Known for his staged documentaries, Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen has five American teenagers from a small town in Arizona reenact their own lives—past, present and future.

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Since the 1970s, the travelling and extremely productive film poet Jon Bang Carlsen has created an extensive body of work with a creative and personal look at the world, with the staged documentary as his preferred form. When his beloved wife passes away, he reaches for filmmaking as a way to give his grief a form. ‘The Banality of Grief’ is a cinematic love letter to a loved one and to the places where they shared their lives for 35 years. South Africa, the USA, their shared home by the water. The boundaries between past and present end in an impressionistic and deeply personal film, where existential and artistic thoughts are countered by new impressions, which testify that life is the greatest of them all. Jon Bang Carlsen is a rare and precious figure in Danish cinema. An adventurer with an ever-recording camera, who directs his gaze outwards even when his thoughts are turned inwards.

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To what extent does a director stay objective and anonymously hidden behind the camera? The Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen knows for sure that the choices he makes in his films aren’t accidental. Several excerpts from his own work show that events in his personal life have a major influence on his work. In fact, he appears to be using images that he recognizes in particular. It’s a revelation for this filmmaker, who used to think he could stay objective and invisible. Topics such as doubting his faith, his runaway father and impressions from a carefree childhood are recurring themes in his diverse oeuvre. Showing us individual scenes, Carlsen comments in voice-over on the images and muses about his life and work.

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While current events are being discussed in the news and the residents of Riga are plagued by their everyday worries, cats are fully occupied with aimlessly wandering around staircases, offices, and apartments, completely indifferent to the absurd hustle and bustle of our civilization. This clever pseudo-documentary play on words comments on the role of subjectivity in our perception of the world around us.

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Seven versions of Riga, the city on the Baltic Sea, and its features as seen by outstanding European film directors: Sergei Loznitsa (The Old Jewish Cemetery), Ivars Seleckis (On Ķīpsala), Audrius Stonys (Riga Boats), Jaak Kilmi (Littering Prohibited!), Jon Bang Karlsen (Cats in Riga), Rainer Komers (Daugava Delta), and Bettina Henkel (Theatre Street 6).

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In his new feature film Jon Bang Carlsen inserts the viewer into the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, a world where families put on a brave face to mask the tension and turmoil at home. The kids are rebelling and the parents doesn’t know how to deal with them. With their parents consent, the children are abducted and bundled into a van which takes them to a reform school in the middle of the desert, in Utah. Blending fact with fiction, Carlsen shows us how parents sometimes achieve control by surrendering it and how fabrications can help us understand real life.

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The film is about growing up in an idyllic country neighboring Germany. An uneasy silence reveals itself as the absence of truth about my Scandinavian culture’s involvement with the incomprehensible evil that stems from trying to “purify” other cultures. Following the tale of two Auschwitz survivors, we are led into a devastating past that leads straight into our future.

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Portrait of God is a documentary road movie about the manhunt for the most wanted person in the world. The film is constructed as a classic detective story. A middle-aged detective shadows the suspect through the highs and lows of South African society until he ends up in a gigantic prison in Cape Town bursting with murderers, thieves, and rapists.

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The film follows Hjalmar and Simon, the director’s sons, on a journey of discovery through a foreign land. The family has moved to South Africa, not long after the end of the rigid white apartheid regime, which brutally oppressed the country’s black population.

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I traveled to South Africa to find a white family living on a desolate farm. I wanted to film how they faced the new days of equality after the fall of Apartheid. But I soon lost my way both on the endless roads and in my way. Instead, the film became a story about two very different women who both experienced a tragic loss in the midst of a white community not too fond of the future.

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Jon Bang Carlsen's essay about his way of approaching reality with a camera. Following the filming of "It's Now or Never", the story of an Irish bachelor's quest for love, Jon Bang Carlsen elaborates on how he manipulates reality in order to get to the core of it. " Staged documentary " he calls his method.

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On the windswept planes of the Burren, fifty-something bachelor Jimmy McEvoy spends his days constructing dry stone walls and waiting for a call from the matchmaker, as he muses on life and love.

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Set in 1962 during the Berlin crisis, the contented lifestyle of Carmen and her kid brother, whom she's nicknamed Babyface, comes to an abrupt end when their parents acrimoniously separate.

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A young woman goes on a vacation at an old farm, which once belonged to her deceased grandmother. Childhood traumas and the memories of her strict and authoritarian grandmother haunts the young woman and leads her to scary delusions and a mental breakdown.

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Drama about a young Dane who has traveled to America to find the father he can hardly remember. In New Mexico he gets to know the daughter of a political-religious fanatic who runs a "survival school". The young Dane is interested in the girl and admits to school. Later, however, there will be a violent showdown with the fanatic. But was this man, in fact, his father?

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Two aging ladies are preparing for the new season in the hotel that they manage in the Danish island of Fanø. They share memories of old times, clean and inspect the rooms and play a few tricks on one another.

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During a production of "Hamlet", the withdrawn lead actor and the girl playing Ophelia, who has just escaped a life of drugs and prostitution, spark an unlikely and low-key romance.

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A staged documentary about an American ex-Vietnam soldier who teaches other Americans - men, women, children - to use weapons to defend themselves and obtain the possibility to say: "NO".

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A documentary comedy about extras in Hollywood and how their dreams reflect the society they live in. The film's stage is an old hotel in the middle of Hollywood. Dilapidated inside as well as outside, but the passing of time hasn't eradicated all traces of an elegant past. Until the beginning of the 1960th the Stars from Broadway lived in Montecito Hotel on Franklin Avenue when they flew in from New York to film at the big studios. But the Stars have disappeared and those who dream about being Stars have moved into their hotel rooms, the extras, the hookers, the pimps, the restless dreamers stuck in a hotel with a dying elevator that slowly drives them crazy.

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A former army officer befriends an elderly, poorly, lady and encourages her to enjoy reminiscing about her youthful days.

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The 76 year old Jenny Jespersen lives in Bovbjerg byt the west coast of Jutland in Denmark. She has a sober approach to life and a strong Christian faith. "A human with faith is like a bird without wings", she says. Poeticly the film shows Jenny and her everyday life on a farm with her bachelor son and all their habits. But it is also a portrait of a beautiful and special region shaped by rough weather and strong beliefs.

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In the lead-up to Christmas 1974, an army of about seventy Santa Clauses, male and female, paraded through the city of Copenhagen, singing carols, handing out sweets and hot chocolate, and asking everyone what they wanted for Christmas. After spending a few days cementing the good image of Santa Claus, their generosity became increasingly radical. Among other things, the Santas climbed a barbed wire fence surrounding the recently shutte red General Motors assembly plant with the purpose of giving jobs back to “their rightful owners.” The week-long performance reached its crescendo inside one of Copenhagen’s biggest department stores when the Santas started handing out presents to customers directly off the shelves. The performance exposed the radical implications of the myth of Santa Claus’ boundless generosity, demonstrating that true generosity is impossible within the narrow terms of capitalist society.

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When the Indians occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1973 as a protest against the abuses of the white Americans, the Solvognen street theater organized an event in the center of Copenhagen: "Indians" were driven by "cavalrymen" towards Rådhuspladsen, where the massacre was carried out, while "Nixon" paid tribute to American democracy and a girl guard marched triumphantly over the polling station. Seven cinematographers covered this piece of street theatre.

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Sara is a 4-year-old mentally deficient living with her parents and a little sister. Sara was never institutionalized as her parents decided that it had to be possible to live an everyday life with the child in spite of the doctors' warning that it would ruin their lives if she was not sent off to an institution.

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To what extent does a director stay objective and anonymously hidden behind the camera? The Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen knows for sure that the choices he makes in his films aren’t accidental. Several excerpts from his own work show that events in his personal life have a major influence on his work. In fact, he appears to be using images that he recognizes in particular. It’s a revelation for this filmmaker, who used to think he could stay objective and invisible. Topics such as doubting his faith, his runaway father and impressions from a carefree childhood are recurring themes in his diverse oeuvre. Showing us individual scenes, Carlsen comments in voice-over on the images and muses about his life and work.

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What are the consequences of a young person to be famous at an early age, being a public person? "Født til Filmen" is about the Danish actress Stine Bierlich's (1967 - 2007) life and career. Through interviews with herself, with her family - Ann Bierlich (mother), Asger Leth (brother), Jørgen Leth (stepfather), friends and people from the film industry it tells us about Stine's life from being a child actress to becoming a celebrated young star of the 80's. The film is a comment on today's worshipping of stars, and how fame has almost become a drug in itself. It’s as if here’s every answer to any doubt. But as Stine's story shows, reality can actually be the opposite.

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Portrait of God is a documentary road movie about the manhunt for the most wanted person in the world. The film is constructed as a classic detective story. A middle-aged detective shadows the suspect through the highs and lows of South African society until he ends up in a gigantic prison in Cape Town bursting with murderers, thieves, and rapists.

Open details →

I traveled to South Africa to find a white family living on a desolate farm. I wanted to film how they faced the new days of equality after the fall of Apartheid. But I soon lost my way both on the endless roads and in my way. Instead, the film became a story about two very different women who both experienced a tragic loss in the midst of a white community not too fond of the future.

Open details →

Danish auteur Jon Bang Carlsen takes stock of his life's work, the art of cinema and life itself in a film that stretches from the west coast of Denmark to the red desert sands of Arizona.

Open details →

Where does the dream begin and reality end? In Dreaming Arizona, this is the question both for the central figures and for the viewer. Known for his staged documentaries, Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen has five American teenagers from a small town in Arizona reenact their own lives—past, present and future.

Open details →

To what extent does a director stay objective and anonymously hidden behind the camera? The Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen knows for sure that the choices he makes in his films aren’t accidental. Several excerpts from his own work show that events in his personal life have a major influence on his work. In fact, he appears to be using images that he recognizes in particular. It’s a revelation for this filmmaker, who used to think he could stay objective and invisible. Topics such as doubting his faith, his runaway father and impressions from a carefree childhood are recurring themes in his diverse oeuvre. Showing us individual scenes, Carlsen comments in voice-over on the images and muses about his life and work.

Open details →

While current events are being discussed in the news and the residents of Riga are plagued by their everyday worries, cats are fully occupied with aimlessly wandering around staircases, offices, and apartments, completely indifferent to the absurd hustle and bustle of our civilization. This clever pseudo-documentary play on words comments on the role of subjectivity in our perception of the world around us.

Open details →