News

A solitary man roams a mountainous forest. He is clad in coarse furs and carries a rough bow for hunting, an essential survival task at which he is, alas, not very good. So he descends from the wilderness to forage in… a gas-station convenience store?

It’s a bone-dry opener to the male midlife crisis Danish filmmaker Thomas Daneskov is toying with in his second feature, Wild Men, but it’s pretty much the most intriguing bit of play this deeply black comedy manages. Oh, there’s definitely stuff worth spending time with here, but this odyssey of modern manhood is far more daring in what it is attempting than it how it succeeds, or not.

The man on the mountain is Martin (Rasmus Bjerg), who has “just grown tired of everything” — by which he means his loving wife and two small daughters, and the corporate job we may presume...

People often contend with their midlife crisis in drastically different ways, some of which aren’t considered to be rational or socially acceptable by modern culture. Actor Rasmus Bjerg’s protagonist of Martin is one of those people who takes his existential crisis to the extreme in the upcoming comedy, ‘Wild Men.’ Samuel Goldwyn Films is set […]

The post Wild Men Exclusive Clip Features Actors Rasmus Bjerg and Zaki Youssef Terrorizing an Unsuspecting Couple appeared first on Shockya.com.

Mubi Go, which has helped buoy NYC’s arthouse market by offering members a free movie ticket a week at participating theaters, expands to LA today where the biz could really use a boost. The films are curated and the first is Apple’s Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Mubi, a global streaming service, production company and film distributor, launched Mubi Go in New York last fall and will continue expanding to major markets through 2022 with Chicago next. “We’re being very careful and methodical about the rollout,” said distribution chief Chris Wells.

Mubi members get Mubi Go as a perk. The company doesn’t release subscriber numbers but Wells said its NYC base jumped by 30 after it added Mubi Go.

Movie picks include its own releases, like Lingui, The Sacred Bonds, but mostly from other distributors from Drive My Car, The Power of the Dog and Passing to We’re...

What happens when you want to go back to nature, only to find that nature is not at all welcoming? If you’re the midlife-crisis-beset Martin (Rasmus Bjerg), the hangdog protagonist of “Wild Men,” you might figure that after 10 days of trying to rough it in the wild as a landlocked Viking, it would be a good time to trek out of the Norwegian woods and seek snacks, beer, smokes and other necessities at a roadside service station minimart.

Trouble is, as we see during the opening minutes of Thomas Daneskov’s gently absurdist comedy, although Martin did remember to tuck his iPhone in his animal-skin garb before fleeing the constraints of civilization, he neglected to bring along any money. And the understandably discombobulated clerk behind the counter isn’t willing to barter when Martin offers pelts, and an axe, as payment for his items. One thing leads to another,...

"An absurdist chuckle-fest." Samuel Goldwyn Films has revealed an official trailer for an indie comedy from Denmark titled Wild Men, which is finally getting a US release this June. It first premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, and also stopped by the Neuchâtel and Fantasia Film Festivals. In a desperate attempt to cure his midlife crisis, Martin has fled his family to live high up in the Norwegian mountains. Hunting and gathering like his ancestors did thousands of years ago, living in the wild. But surprise, surprise, Martin's quest for manhood leads to deep and hilariously uncomfortable realizations about the presumed masculine ideal. Rasmus Bjerg stars as Martin, with an extra manly cast including Zaki Youssef, Bjørn Sundquist, Marco Ilsø, Jonas Bergen Rahmanzadeh, Håkon T. Nielsen, Tommy Karlsen, Rune Temte, and Sofie Gråbøl. This looks like a Taika Waititi comedy but from Scandinavia, with a hilarious cast of characters and so many wacky scenes.

Dressed in animal furs and brandishing an axe, an office worker goes full Fred Flintstone in this madcap comedy featuring Sofie Gråbøl

You wouldn’t think it possible to commit armed robbery accidentally. But that’s exactly what happens to poor clueless Martin when he gets into an altercation with an attendant at a petrol station while dressed as a Viking in animal furs, with axe in hand. Martin has run away to the snow-capped mountains to hunt, forage and find the meaning of life. The snag is that his survival skills are more Alan Partridge than Bear Grylls – hence the foray to the petrol station for beer and crisps.

The Danish film-maker Thomas Daneskov’s deadpan midlife-crisis comedy has some brilliantly absurd moments such as this. Rasmus Bjerg plays Martin, who has tried half-marathons and road cycling, but still feels dead inside. Telling his long-suffering wife, Anne (The Killing...

The scene in Thomas Daneskov’s droll Danish comedy where it is most difficult to suspend disbelief involves a pet rabbit who escapes from her carrier at a service station and runs away. Rabbits are by nature conservative animals, fixed in their ways and very territorial, so this is unlikely behaviour. The two girls to whom she belonged are distraught. Their mother Anne attempts to reassure them that the rabbit will live a happy life in the wild. “No she won’t,” says one of the girls. “She’ll get eaten.”

The girls’ father, Martin (Rasmus Bjerg), has been living in the wild for over a week. he told them he was going to a conference but the longer he spends in his new life, the less he feels able to return to the old one. he was dissatisfied there. it’s something which he struggles to put his...

Paris-based sales company Charades launched the film at the online EFM in March.

Samuel Goldwyn Films has acquired US rights to Thomas Daneskov’s comedy thriller Wildmen following its buzzy premiere in Tribeca’s international film competition in June.

Paris-based sales company Charades launched the film at the online EFM in March but truly started tying up deals on the title during the Marché du Film’s Pre-Cannes screenings following its successful Tribeca outing.

It has also sealed deals to the UK (Blue Finch), France (Star Invest), Germany and Switzerland (Koch Media), Italy (I Wonder Pictures), Czech Republic and Slovakia...

A subject many artists are irrevocably drawn towards, we’ve seen numerous films capture different forms of masculinity over the decades. Recently, Wildlife found men who feel lost in an increasingly industrialized or suburban world, desperate to return to a time where masculinity was life or death, where they didn’t have to be emasculated by modern society or contemporary womanhood. Force Majeure captured the changes in masculinity’s role in an amusing and mocking way, almost laughing at its male characters for expressing emotions and not living up to the masculine stereotypes of protection and strength. In Old Joy, men escape to the wilderness to attempt to get a deeper understanding of themselves and those that accompany them, only to realize that there’s something intangible in their lives and that their hollow relationships aren’t enough to make up for what they’re lacking.

Joining the pantheon of cinema’s exploration of manhood,...

TrustNordisk is handling international sales.

TrustNordisk will handle sales on Thomas Daneskov’s comedy Men of the Wild, produced by Lina Flint at Nordisk Film Spring, the outfit behind The Guilty.

Daneskov co-wrote the film with award-winning author Morten Pape.

The film started shooted in the mountains of Norway on October22 and will wrap on November 26.

Rasmus Bjerg and Zaki Youssef star in the comedy about a Danish man who runs away from his modern life to find himself in nature. But he finds himself on the run with an unlikely companion.

The cast also includes Sofie Grabol, Jonas Bergen Rahmanzadeh and Bjørn Sundquist.

Danish director Ulaa Salim talks to Variety about his provocative debut feature, thriller “Sons Of Denmark,” which made a strong showing in Rotterdam’s Tiger competition and just screened at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The film is set in 2025, and unfolds in a Denmark where an ultra-nationalist politician, Martin Nordahl, is poised to assume the premiership, one year after an Islamic terror attack on the Copenhagen Metro. Nordahl’s extreme rhetoric and fear mongering in regard to the country’s Muslim citizens and immigrants goads the far-right organization Sons of Denmark into committing hate crimes. Meanwhile, some of the country’s Arabic minority make plans to resist.

Salim, a recent graduate of the Danish National Film School, was born in Denmark to Iraqi-émigré parents. He and producer Daniel Mühlendorph, a film school classmate, established their own company Hyæne Film, and this is their first feature production.

I saw that your...

Variety has been given exclusive access to the trailer for the opening film of Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Competition, “Sons of Denmark.”

The film is a political thriller set in Denmark in 2025, a year after a bomb attack in Copenhagen, when ethnic tensions are running high. An ultra-nationalist politician, Martin Nordahl, and his National Movement are leading in the polls, and influenced by his anti-immigrant rhetoric, society has rapidly turned on ethnic minorities.

In this climate, 19-year-old Zakaria feels compelled to act to protect his family’s safety. However, to do what he feels is necessary to turn the political tide, he needs to abandon his mother and little brother, and get involved in a radical organization.

“The film is a very personal and visual thriller that packs a powerful punch and really catches the zeitgeist of Europe today,” according to New Europe Film Sales, which is handling world sales.

Principal photography is about to begin on “Collision,” a new feature by Denmark’s Avaz brothers, who were among Variety’s 10 Europeans to Watch in 2018.

Produced by the trio’s Rocket Road Pictures and Kim Magnusson, along with Nordisk Film, the drama explores a family’s struggles to stay together after tragedy strikes. The cast includes leading Danish actors Nikolaj Lie Kaas (“Angels & Demons”), Rasmus Bjerg and Nicolas Bro.

Scriptwriter Milad Avaz said the film was inspired by a friend who was going through a bitter divorce. The brothers wanted to explore how a married couple’s decisions during a difficult breakup affect their children, which offers a chance, said Milad, to “make a movie that will actually influence some lives.”

The brothers broke the mold with “While We Live,” their low-budget feature debut, which was shot for around $300,000 and went on to become a breakout box-office hit in...

The low-budget debut was made as part of Nordisk’s new-talent initiative Spring.

The influential Danish Cinema Club (Biografklub Danmark) has selected the 10 films for its 2017-2018 season. They are:

Breathe, dir Andy Serkis (May 31)Gud Taler Ud (literal translation God Speaks Out), dir Henrik Ruben Genz (Sept 28)The Guilty, dir Gustav MollerThe Journey, Nick Hamm (May 3)Never Again A Tomorrow, dir Erik Clausen (Aug 31)The Papers, Steven Spielberg (April 5)Sa laenge jeg lever, dir Ole Bornedal (March 8)̊Suburbicon, dir George Clooney (Dec 7)Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, dir Martin McDonagh (Jan 11)Victoria And Abdul, dir Stephen Frears (Nov 2)

It’s notable that the scheme has included amongst the starrier productions, The Guilty (pictured), a low-budget debut feature made as part of Nordisk’s new-talent initiative Spring.

The Guilty is the debut feature of Gustav Moller and is a real-time, contained thriller about an alarm dispatcher (Jakob Cedergren) who races against time to save a kidnapped woman. The...