A FAMILY

EEN FILM VAN

Pernille Fischer Christensen

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A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen

PROJECT SUMMARY

Een productie van Taal DEENS Originele titel EN FAMILIE Lengte 99 MINUTEN Genre DRAMA Land van herkomst DENEMARKEN Filmmaker PERNILLE FISCHER CHRISTENSEN Hoofdrollen LENE MARIA CHRISTENSEN (Brothers, ) (Melancholia, The Young Victoria, The Interpreter) PILOU AESBAK (Worlds Apart) ANNE LOUISE HASSING Release datum 4 AUGUSTUS 2011 DVD Release 5 JANUARI 2012 Awards/nominaties FILM FESTIVAL BERLIJN 2010 NOMINATIE GOUDEN BEER WINNAAR FIPRESCI PRIJS Kijkwijzer

SYNOPSIS Ditte Rheinwald vertegenwoordigt de jongste generatie van de beroemde Deense bakkersfamilie. Haar eigen dromen en ambities zijn echter anders dan die van haar familie. Als ze een droombaan bij een galerie in New York krijgt aangeboden, besluit ze samen met haar vriend Peter de kans aan te grijpen. De toekomst lijkt stralend, het leven vrolijk en simpel. Maar dan wordt Ditte’s charismatische vader Rikard, meesterbakker en hofleverancier, ernstig ziek. Als Rikard eist dat zij de leiding overneemt van het familiebedrijf, raakt haar hele leven uit balans. Plotseling is het leven niet meer zo simpel.

CAST Ditte Lene Maria Christensen Far Jesper Christensen Peter Pilou Asbæk Sanne Anne Louise Hassing Chrisser Line Kruse Line Coco Hjardemaal Vimmer Gustav Fischer Kjærulff

CREW DIRECTOR Pernille Fischer Christensen SCREENWRITERS Kim Fupz Aakeson, Pernille Fischer Christensen D.O.P. Jakob Ihre EDITORS Janus Billeskov Jansen, Anne Østerud SOUND DESIGN Peter Schultz COMPOSER Sebastian Öberg SET DESIGN Rasmus Thjellesen COSTUME DESIGN Signe Sejlund MAKEUP DESIGN Anne-Cathrine Sauerberg CASTING Djamila Hansen

A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen

INTRODUCTION TO THE FILM

With her third feature film, A Family, award-winning director Pernille Fischer Christensen has crafted a powerful family drama about the relationship between duty and freedom, responsibility and love. The young up-coming Lene Maria Christensen plays the part of Ditte, who represents the youngest generation of a famous family of bakers, but Ditte has dreams of her own that pull her in a different direction. She wants to travel the world and live life to the fullest and when she’s offered a dream job in New York she’s on the fast track to success.

That is, until her father becomes critically ill and Ditte faces the choice between pursuing an adventure with her boyfriend or staying at home to pick up the pieces of her disintegrating family.

Pernille Fischer Christensen has written the film’s screenplay in collaboration with Kim Fupz Aakeson. The two of them also wrote the screenplay for Pernille Fischer Christensen’s feature film debut, , which won the Silver Bear and the award for Best Feature Film Debut at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as the 2007 National Critics’ Award for Best Film. The world premiere of A Family will be at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival where it will be featured in this year’s Competition.

The film is produced by the new producer duo Sisse Graum Jørgensen and Vinca Wiedemann - who as the first artistic director of New Danish Screen - was responsible for subsidizing Pernille Fischer Christensen’s debut film, A Soap. Sisse Graum Jørgensen’s main responsibilities are financing, organizing and PR, while Vinca Wiedemann holds the artistic reins by counseling the director on the development of the screenplay and the creative consequences of production decisions.

DIRECTOR’S VISION

We are all born into something that already is, a family. Circumstances, parents, siblings, love and demands, norms, manners, values, a language. We’re named. We’re somebody’s son or daughter. We belong somewhere.

We receive it like a present, but it is also imposed upon us. A family is both privilege and duty; if we’re lucky, we can count on our family, but we can usually also count on it to expect something of us.

We dream of the family as something steady and unchanging, but life itself is change. Sometimes we can control it: we can get married, get divorced, travel, stay at home, have kids or chose not to. At other times, the family changes before our very eyes. New members join, others pass away, sometimes those most loved and indispensable.

We have to find ourselves in all of this, find out who we are and what to do with all that’s been granted us. We might be expected to honor our father and mother, but we’ll probably also tell them NO , disappoint them and reject them.

And get ready to build a life that’s our own. Create our own family, bear new members into the life we have prepared for them... -Pernille Fischer Christensen

A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen

THE RHEINWALD FAMILY – A MODERN FAMILY FOR BETTER OR WORSE Interview with Pernille Fischer Christensen

We live in a time where the old family structures have fallen apart and where family more often than not is a conglomerate of your, mine and our kids from different litters, different parents and different backgrounds. What actually constitutes a family today? That question is the thematic core of the drama in Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Family, featured in The Competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. In 2006 Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Soap won the Silver Bear – the Jury Grand Prix - as well as the award for Best Debut Film. Although A Family shares a specific brand of intensity with A Soap it originates from a completely different place.

“This time I wanted to tell a story where I already was the specialist,” says Pernille Fischer Christensen, who initially drew much from her own experience of illness in the family. “Both my parents have been ill and the film originally sprung from a need to delve into my own memories and see what could grow from them,” she says. She stresses that the film is in not a direct account of her own story, but tells a story that all families have dealt with. “A story about the roles each of us play in our families, about the love and ability to lead our lives with which our parents have ushered us into adult life, and not least about how we choose to manage it,” as Pernille Fischer Christensen says.

A Family is about the gallery owner Ditte (Lene Maria Christensen), who is headed for New York with her boyfriend Peter (Pilou Asbæk). She has been offered job the job of her dreams, the future is bright, and life is full of possibilities. But fate soon intervenes in the form of two decisive events: first she discovers that she’s pregnant and shortly after that her father (Jesper Christensen), the master baker and purveyor to the royal court, is seriously ill. The question of the true nature of identity becomes essential to Ditte. She has grown accustomed to a life with complete freedom of choice but now finds herself torn between wanting to take care of her family and her desire to pursue her own dreams with her boyfriend. Suddenly she is faced with some impossible choices and at the same time she becomes a target for her father’s rage and acrimony when his life’s work is put in jeopardy. What is more important to Ditte: carrying on the proud traditions of her family – or exploring new territory with her boyfriend?

At the same time, A Family is also a portrait of the gulf between Ditte’s generation and that of her father, and not least the differences in their views on life.

“Richard, the father, grew up within a tradition. Maybe he hasn’t really given much thought to what he wanted to do with his life. It was all decided for him. In Ditte’s case it is a conscious choice. Ditte’s generation – which is also my own generation – values freedom and the idea of shaping our own lives very, very highly. We have a hard time accepting limitations,” Pernille Fischer Christensen says and continues: “Ditte’s dilemma is the choice between opting out family or not, but over the course of the film she slowly realizes that the greatest love lies within the family.”

The film presents a wistful glance at a childhood long lost with flickering bright pictures of summer in central , Danish strawberries and sun kissed children. “I’d like for the audience to write their own family history into the film. The childhood photos in the beginning of the film look like the ones which we all have in our family albums. I want to conjure up an atmosphere of childhood, to plug into a collective memory of family – so that the audience will hopefully feel present, both in the here and now, but also in their own backstory and childhood memories,” the director says. “I wanted to make a film that manages to be both bright and happy, but at the same time also shoulder deep in the darkest of elements. In my film life is full of sunshine in the streets, strawberry cake, physical closeness and possibilities – an open world ready to be conquered – right up until misfortune strikes. A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen

Also, I’ve wanted to depict how life and love is perhaps most deeply felt when faced with the most severe sorrow.”

Ditte comes from a family with proud traditions but at the same time she’s also a modern woman with contemporary dreams and hopes for her life – dreams that are dealt a blow by the dramatic events of the film. “Ditte is a person who over a short period of time encounters the fragile nature of life – both in relation to her own pregnancy and to her father’s illness, which remind her that life doesn’t last forever,” Pernille Fischer Christensen says and elaborates: “Our lives pose two basic existential conditions. On one hand, you create your own life from a series of small choices that you make – like small pearls on a string. On the other hand, there’s the basic condition that life isn’t eternal and there are lots of things you can’t choose for yourself. What you’re born into, what blood flows in your veins, how your parents’ choices will affect your life, and so on. And those two aspects of life are constantly clashing throughout the film,” the director tells us.

The film doesn’t offer any easy answers to Ditte’s dilemmas, which are, by and large, some we will all have to face. “The big question posed in this film is: What is a family? What constitutes the modern family? Is it even possible to maintain the idea of the sanctity of family, when we allow ourselves to be divorced? That is, after all, a question we live with ourselves – those of us who are children of divorced parents and perhaps even divorced ourselves.”

Pernille Fischer Christensen has sought to give the film an unmanipulated look. “We’ve worked from the settings we found ourselves in. If it rained, it became a scene in rain, and if the sun was shining, that’s how it’d be. We filmed the surroundings as they were, and the sense of intimacy you get from the film is a result of that,” the director says about the film’s snapshot aesthetic, which creates a sense of documentary-like presence and quivering intensity. “It’s an aesthetic I’ve tried to foster in all of my films, the feeling of the moment and being witness to a small slice of ‘lived life’. And like in real life, there’s no definitive meaning for the audience to derive analytically. You can uncover a connection if that makes sense to you, but you can also choose not to,” Pernille Fischer Christensen concludes.

CAST

LENE MARIA CHRISTENSEN (DITTE)

Lene Maria Christensen (born 1972) graduated from the Danish National School of Theatre in 1999. She had her breakthrough in Henrik Ruben Genz’ critically acclaimed and award-winning Terribly Happy (2008), which won her both a National Critics’ Award and a National Film Academy Award for Best Female Lead of the year. That same year, she received a special award, which is given for an exceptional performance in theater, film or TV. She has previously appeared in films like Big Plans (2005) and Easy Skanking (2006), for which she received both a National Critics’ Awards and a National Film Academy Award nomination for Best Female Lead. Lene Maria has appeared in several Danish TV series, most recently Lulu & Leon (2009) where she received critical praise for her title role of Lulu. Lene Maria Christensen has previously often been cast for her obvious comedic talent, but with A Family, we witness a much more contemplative and serious side of Christensen, as she portrays the main part of Ditte with a nuanced and very convincing mixture of raw willpower and delicate sensitivity.

JESPER CHRISTENSEN (RICHARD)

Jesper Christensen (born 1948) is one of ’s greatest and most legendary actors. He has appeared in more than 100 films by both Danish and international directors like Per Fly, Marc A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen

Forster, John Madden, Lone Scherfig, Sydney Pollack, , Martin Campbell, Anette K. Olesen and Pernille Fischer Christensen. So far, his work on the silver screen has been awarded with 4 National Critics’ Awards and 4 National Film Academy Awards. In the past years, he has drawn international attention to himself as the charismatic Bond villain Mr. White in the last two Bond movies Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008), as well as in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (2005) where he appeared opposite Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn and in Lars von Triers Melancholia (2011). Jesper Christensen has been nominated by the European Film Academy for European Actor of the Year in both 2001 (The Bench) and 2006 (Manslaughter). Jesper Christensen first became a household name when he played Nana’s awkward and lovable father in the popular Danish TV-series Nana (1988), but among other artistic milestones the main role of Kaj in Per Fly’s critically acclaimed and award-winning The Bench (2000) should also be mentioned – a role that earned Jesper Christensen a National Film Academy Award and a National Critics’ Award for Best Male Lead and thus cemented his status as one of the most talented character actors in Danish cinema. In A Family, he embodies the strong-willed patriarch with sensitivity and toughness in equal measure, and the strenuous role that demanded he lose 16 kilos during the six weeks of shooting once again proves Jesper Christensen’s uncompromising approach to acting.

PILOU ASBÆK (PETER)

Pilou Asbæk (born 1982) graduated from the Danish National School of Theatre in 2008. He had his big screen debut in Niels Arden Oplev’s award-winning Worlds Apart (2008) and has since appeared in Christian E. Christiansen’s teen drama Crying for Love (2008), Ulrik Wivel’s Comeback (2008), and Martin Schmidt’s Monster Busters (2009). Most recently, Danish TV viewers could enjoy Pilou Asbæk in TV 2 Denmark’s drama series Blekinge Street, and this fall he will have a significant role in DR ’s big political drama series The Castle about the day to day business at The Parliament. Pilou Asbæk is a seductive and erotic match to Lene Maria Christensen, and he portrays Ditte’s boyfriend, Peter, with both warmth and precision.

ANNE LOUISE HASSING (SANNE)

Anne Louise Hassing (born 1967) graduated from the Danish National School of Theatre in 1997. She debuted on film with ’ from 1992 – a role that earned her both a National Critics’ Award and a National Film Academy Award. In 1999, she received another National Critics’ Award for Best Female Supporting Role, this time for her appearance in ’s The Idiots, which was shown in the main competition at the in 1998. On Danish television, she could be seen in the TV series Island Cop (1998) and in particular in DR ’s ambitious Sunday evening drama Better Times (2004-2007) in which she played the lead - the thoroughly sweet Ida – a role that earned her the award for best female TV actor in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Playing the stepmother in A Family, Anne Louise Hassing proves her ability to breathe life into a part that could otherwise very well have been overshadowed by the central drama. But with naturalness and a quivering presence she turns Sanne into a woman of flesh, blood and intense emotions.

LINE KRUSE (CHRISSER)

Line Kruse (born 1975) graduated from the School of Performance at Theatre in 2000, but already at the age of 12, she achieved nationwide fame for playing the title role in Søren Kragh- Jacobsen’s portrayal of the 1930’s, Emma’s Shadow (1988), in which she displayed an astonishing natural talent. Since then, her screen credits have among others included the role of the big sister in the popular series of The Crumbs movies, but following Kruse’s graduation from acting school, it has in particular been on theater stages throughout the country that we have been able to enjoy her A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen talent – including major roles at the Royal Danish Theatre. Parallel to this, she has had minor roles in films such as In China They Eat Dogs (1999), Truly Human (2001), The Green Butchers (2003), and Clash of Egos (2005). The part of Chrisser – Ditte’s younger sister and the eternal number two in their father’s order of succession – never becomes simple or trivial in the hands of Line Kruse, who imbues the character with life and growth in the relationships to both her sister and father.

CREW

PERNILLE FISCHER CHRISTENSEN (DIRECTOR)

Pernille Fischer Christensen (born 1969) graduated as a director from the National Film School of Denmark in 1999. Fischer Christensen’s feature film debut, A Soap (2006), premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006 where it took home both the Silver Bear – the Jury Grand Prix – and the award for Best Debut Film. Among many other awards, A Soap also won a National critics’ Award, for Best Film in 2007. Her second feature film, the critically acclaimed Dancers, premiered in 2008. A Family (2010) is Pernille Fischer Christensen’s third feature film.

Filmography: 2010 A Family 2008 Dancers 2006 A Soap 2002 Habibti My Love (short film) 1999 India (graduation film from the National Film School of Denmark) 1997 The Girl Named Sister (short film) 1996 Honda Honda (short film)

KIM FUPZ AAKESON (SCREENWRITER) Kim Fupz Aakeson (born 1958) graduated as a screenwriter from the National Film School of Denmark in 1996. Since then, he’s been one of the most popular and award-winning screenwriters in Danish cinema. Among other films, he’s written the screenplays for The One and Only (1999), In Your Hands (2002), Accused (2005), Prague (2006), Little Soldier (2008), and not least Pernille Fischer Christensen’s feature film debut, A Soap (2006). As a writer, Aakeson has authored more than 70 titles, including comic books, children’s books, teen books, collections of short stories, and novels – most recently the novel Jonna er 54 (published by Gyldendal). He has won awards for his writing all over the world, and in 2003, the Danish film critics acknowledged his work with an honorary National Critics’ Award . At this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Aakeson will have no less than two of his films in the main competition, as he has also written the screenplay for Norwegian Hans Petter Moland’s A Somewhat Gentle Man.

A Family is the first result of the producing collaboration between Vinca Wiedemann and Sisse Graum Jørgensen, and the duo has multiple new film projects in the pipeline.

VINCA WIEDEMANN (PRODUCER)

Since graduating as a film editor from the National Film School of Denmark in 1987, Vinca Wiedemann (born 1959) has become one of the most influential women in Danish cinema. In 1999 she became film commissioner at the Danish Film Institute where she subsidized the production of films like Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (2000), ’s Songs from the Second Floor (2000), Lars von Trier’s (2003), Per Fly’s The Inheritance (2003), Susanne Bier’s (2002), and Christoffer Boe’s debut feature film, Reconstruction (2003). In 2003, Vinca Wiedemann was appointed the first artistic director of the talent subsidy scheme New Danish Screen, which was A FAMILY – Pernille Fischer Christensen established to support innovation in Danish cinema. In this position, she subsidized Pernille Fischer Christensen’s feature film debut, A Soap. Since 2007 she is a creative producer and writer, and works as advisor for a number of Danish and foreign directors, including Susanne Bier, Christoffer Boe, Thomas Vinterberg and . She’s currently collaboration with Lars von Trier on the screenplay to his upcoming film, Melancholia.

SISSE GRAUM JØRGENSEN (PRODUCER)

Sisse Graum Jørgensen had her producing debut at Zentropa Productions in 2001 with Niels Arden Oplev’s Chop Chop. Since then, Sisse Graum Jørgensen has produced a large amount of the biggest Danish film hits, including Oscar nominee Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), Susanne Bier’s Brothers (2004) and Oscar nominated After the Wedding (2006), as well as Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy (2005), based on a screenplay by Lars von Trier. The following year, Sisse Graum Jørgensen produced Niels Arden Oplev’s massive hit, We Shall Overcome (2006), which was awarded a Crystal Bear in Berlin for Best Film. The film magazine Screen International focused on her in their 2004 Talent Watch, and the same year she also appeared in Variety’s Cannes tribute “10 Producers to Watch”. In 2006, she was also executive producer on Andrea Arnold’s Cannes winner Red Road. Currently, Sisse is producing Susanne Bier’s The Revenge released in Denmark August 2010.