Else Petersen

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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A road movie that tells the story of two very different young women, Charlot and Charlotte, who meet by chance and end up driving together across Denmark from Copenhagen to Skagen. Along the way, they meet a wide range of very different people, from the senile Birksted to the psychopathic mass murderer Poul-Teddy, to a theater troupe and the elderly residents of a nursing home run by a headstrong matron. The naive and provincial Charlotte learns spontaneity from the smart city girl Charlot, while Charlot, in turn, learns from Charlotte to appreciate the experiences close to home.

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The Kingdom is the most technologically advanced hospital in Denmark, a gleaming bastion of medical science. A rash of uncanny occurrences, however, begins to weaken the staff's faith in science – a phantom ambulance pulls in every night, but disappears; voices echo in the elevator shaft; and a pregnant doctor's fetus seems to be developing much faster than is natural.

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At The Kingdom, Denmark's most technologically advanced hospital, a number of strange and otherworldly events begin occurring, much to the dismay of its doctors and patients. A ghostly ambulance appears and disappears, the voice of a little girl calls to a patient in an elevator shaft, and a doctor's fetus begins growing at an alarming rate.

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Family drama set in the Danish countryside in the turn of the century. A wealthy landowner is an evil and corrupt womaniser with several illegitimate offspring in addition to his beautiful family. Nobody stands up to him except his feisty 17-year-old daughter.

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Just after World War II, an American takes a railway job in Germany, but finds his position politically sensitive with various people trying to use him.

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Farcial action fun with Bertil and Hugo, who do menial jobs at a big city hotel. Bertil is about to marry and has put money aside for his bride's morning gift. Only Hugo has kind of borrowed the money and blown it all on a wrong bet in a pigeon race. Together, they obviously have to get rich quick. When a diamond seems to be lying around for the taking, the hotel is virtually on its head.

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Per is a traveling man who makes a living setting up new campsites—financed by a rather clueless telephone company and a gawking power plant. Søren has been in prison for eight years for bank robbery—but now he is free and ready to retrieve the buried money. To his great despair, he sees the campsite right where the loot is buried. Together with his greedy girlfriend and her four children, he tries to come up with a plan – but it will take a lot of imagination to get hold of the money.

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Karl Åge and Regitze host a summer garden party for close friends, their son, and his family. Karl Åge is quiet, detached; Regitze is spirited, lively. He thinks back: love at first sight during the war, living together unmarried, her mother's hunger strike when they won't baptize their son. Regitze is passionate and forthright; she speaks her mind. He remembers her inviting a derelict for Christmas dinner, and the man shows up with five bashful friends. He recalls her taking on their son's teacher when the man slaps the lad. He remembers her love of dancing and his fear that his social clumsiness might end their relationship. Now, in twilight, he has other things to face.

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Nikolaj Christensen is a popular Danish folk-rock artist. In this teen-oriented film, Christian (Christensen) is a young man in search of love, who restlessly leaves his home in Denmark to search for it all over Europe, finally finding some semblance of it in Morocco. This slight film is directed by Gabriel Axel, who also directed Babette's Feast. It is likeliest to be of interest to fans of the star and his music, which is used throughout.

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A French housekeeper with a mysterious past brings quiet revolution in the form of one exquisite meal to a circle of starkly pious villagers in late 19th century Denmark.

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FINAL ACT is based on Noel Coward's play "Waiting in the Wings". Even the smallest events turn into mind-blowing dramas at The Set, a retirement home for former actresses in England. Jealousy and madness flare into a firework display of toxicity when ex-primadonna Lotta Henderson (Birgitte Federspiel) moves in. A slap in the face of The Set's leading star in her own eyes, May Davenport (Mime Fønss), who has had a lifelong rivalry with Lotta both on stage and off. The daily dramas reach dizzying heights when a scandalous journalist (Anne Marie Helger) gains access like a wolf in sheep's clothing. A stunt that has a not-so-clever connection to the ladies' burning desire to be granted a veranda. The matter is raised to the highest level of the home's tough board of directors, and The Set's secretary Perry (Holger Juul Hansen) comes under justified suspicion of skulduggery. But this is where May Davenport's diva talent comes in as a sure trump card...

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A comedy about the everydaylife of the 30-year-old something nurse Henriette and her life. Her boyfriend is boring and she has an affair with a violent doctor. She shares an apartment with a gay man and she is close with her brother who is a somewhat insecure and love-seeking guy. However, after some unfortunate clashes with the world, Henriette realizes she is able to stand on her own.

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In a small two-room apartment in a backyard in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, 14-year-old Ester lives with her father, mother, and older brother Carl. It is a typical working-class neighborhood of the time, and the apartment lacks any modern conveniences. Coal must be fetched from a dark basement where homeless people have sought shelter and lodging for the night. Ester is a dreamer. She wants to be a writer and secretly writes poetry. She often loses track of time and place when her thoughts wander.

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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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For Janus his friend Tore is his big ideal: pretty, intelligent and self-confident. Janus is grateful for his friendship even though he is considered the court jester. When Tore falls in love with the beautiful and sweet girl Helle, Janus accepts his role as their highly loved third party. Helle's fashionable mother, however, is a bit too interested in Tore. Written by Allan Simonsen

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Benny and Arnold are homeless and along with others living on Nørrebro in Copenhagen. The police is set to clear the building they squat in, but on the night of the forced eviction, local acid head Spacy jumps from the sixth floor.

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A woman finds herself in a crisis situation after being divorced and having lost her job. Images from her subconscious emerge, activated by childhood memories and confrontations with other women, especially her mother and sister.

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Drama about a young woman who is diagnosed with cancer. We follow her journey and her relationship with her husband and their two children until she dies.

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Based on Leif Panduro's 1958 satire classic. David, a senior high-school student, aims a swift kick at his principal's behind and is committed to a psychiatric ward from the perspective of which he takes a close look at his allegedly sane family. They, of course, are the real loonies. The psychiatrists are worse. Only lovely class-mate Lis is down-to-earth and trustworthy.

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Matador is a Danish TV series produced and shown between 1978 and 1982. It is set in the fictional Danish town of Korsbæk between 1929 and 1947. It follows the lives of a range of characters from across the social spectrum, focusing specifically on the rivalry between the families of two businessmen: The banker Hans Christian Varnæs, an established local worthy, and social climber Mads Skjern, who arrives in town as the series opens. The name Matador was taken from the localised edition of the boardgame Monopoly, also the series' tentative English title. In addition, in contemporary Danish a "matador" is often used to describe a business tycoon, in the series referring to the character of Mads Skjern and his craftiness as a self-made entrepreneur. Directed by famed Danish film maker Erik Balling, Matador was the idea of author Lise Nørgaard who wrote the bulk of the episodes alongside Karen Smith, Jens Louis Petersen and Paul Hammerich. The series is one of the most well-known and popular examples of Danish television and represents the peak of longtime development of Danish TV drama by the public service channel Danmarks Radio. The series has become part of the modern self-understanding of Danes, partly because of its successful mix of melodrama and a distinct warm Danish humour in the depiction of characters, which were portrayed by a wide range of the most popular Danish actors at the time; but also not least because of its accurate portrayal of a turbulent Denmark from around the start of the Great Depression and through Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark in World War II.

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Secret Albanian rocket plans worth 10 million have been stolen - and Albanian, Chinese, Russian and Danish agents vie to recover them.

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Heavily influenced by the French stage sensation La Cage Aux Folles (which was filmed the very same year) a drag-queen comedy about a group of homosexuals sharing an apartment with a naive but straight country boy did not live up to expectations. The lead characters lead boring lives during the day and, as depicted here, downright pathetic existences at night, all decked out in peacock plumes and high heels and with nowhere to go.

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Clumsy secret agent Jensen (aka Agent 69) must deliver secret formula for new revolutionary fuel source to Western agents. Instead, he mistakenly gives it to a random kid, so now both him and evil rogue agent Scorpio go after the kid.

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Mølleby is a small, cozy market town. The year is 1924, and the sight of a Rolls Royce from Copenhagen is a sensation. But all is not as idyllic as it seems. The town's new mayor is trying to build a new brickworks to ensure the town's growth and future, but the previous mayor is doing everything he can to thwart these ambitious plans...

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Elderly sisters write a tell-all erotic memoir that threatens to undermine a nasty nobleman.

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A festive crime comedy about a confused innkeeper who involuntarily finds himself becoming entangled in a larger crime-affair where the villains have stolen and smuggled a precious diamond baked in a cake ...

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Ole Ernst stars as an energetic conman lured into trying to set a factory on fire to catch in on the insurance. The plan backfires and both the factory owner, his wife and the conman hunted by the police must flee to Sweden.

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The town's wealthy benefactor dies, and leaves a bizarre bequest: unless one of the self-righteous citizens can produce an illegitimate child in 9 1/2 months, all his money goes to homeless cats, and they must start paying taxes.

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The series follows the residents of an apartment building on Copenhagen's Christianshavn, as they go about their daily lives and challenges. There is Olsen, a mover with an old fashion view of the world, Clausen who runs the local pet shop, Egon the career focused assistant, their wives who work hard to keep their spouses lives together, the young couple Tue and Rikke who recently moved in, the hard working caretaker Meyer, who never puts in to much effort, and of course Emma, the innkeeper of Rottehullet, where all the important decisions are made while running up the bar tab. The series was produced by Nordisk Film for Danmarks Radio TV station between the years 1970-77. The series' first director was Ebbe Langberg, then Erik Balling and Tom Hedegaard respectively. The series was conceived by an author team of well-known Danish authors such Leif Panduro, Benny Andersen, and Lise Nørgaard.

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The third film about the two good-natured brothers Søren and Peter and their family on the small island of Bomø. This time, the brothers have acquired a soccer-loving dog named Bølle, who turns out to be able to predict the results of betting pools. This causes chaos in the betting service, on Bomø, and at Christiansborg.

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