Danish Wave is a Danish film festival in Moscow, which in recent years has attracted great attention from the audience. Once again Muscovites gets the opportunity to experience highlights from the new Danish film scene when the fourth edition of the festival will take place on 10-15 May in Moscow's oldest and most significant art-house cinema, Kino 35mm.
The festival opens on Thursday 10 May with the drama "Teddy Bear." The film's director Mads Matthiesen, who won the award for best direction in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January, attends the screening for a Q&A. The program In addition, the program consists of a range of thematic and genre different films: Nicholas Arcels historical drama "A Royal Affair", Ole Christian Madsen's divorce comedy "Superclásico" Jannik Splidsboel's artist portrait "How Are You", Mikkel Nørgaard raunchy comedy "Clown - The Movie" and Simon Stahos musical "Love Is in the air."
All films will be shown in Danish with Russian subtitles.
Danish film increasingly popular
"The program is very strong this year," says Alexey Layfurov from Russian festival's organizer CoolConnection. "We hope the festival will bring even more attention to Danish film, which is currently one of the strongest films nations in the world. We can see developments in the distribution even since last year. This time, half of films in the program have already been sold to a local distributor."
This is the case of "Teddy Bear", "Superclásico" and "A Royal Affair" that will have their Russian premieres at the festival, before they hit the screens all over the country later this year.
However, the Russians have long had an eye for Danish cinema, which has helped establish the country's art-house culture, says Alexey Layfurov:
"Local distributors have always had Danish films in the spotlight. Russia is one of the key markets for Lars von Trier, and several Dogma films were released theatrically in the late 90s. At that time the Russian art film market was on the earliest stage of its development, and the number of screens was extremely small. In that respect, Danish films helped to form the market, and now we have space for many small European indie films."
Danish Wave 4 is organized by the Danish Film Institute, the Danish Embassy in Moscow and the Russian organizer CoolConnection.
See full program at Kino 35 mm's website