Limbo begins with a smile, and with a cautionary tale about the mixed signals that a smile can send. Its first image is a large, crudely chalked smiley-face on a blackboard, as Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard) rôle-play a scenario in which a man on the dance floor misconstrues a woman’s smile…
“Are you sure you want to keep it?”, 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) asks Anna (Carla Philip Røder), the pregnant girlfriend of her cousin David (Elliott Crosset Hove), in Jeanette Nordahl’s feature debut Wildland. “Maybe he doesn’t even want to be a dad.” It is a peculiarly inappropriate thing to ask a young, excitedly expectant…
The Duke of Burgundy first published by FilmLand Empire His first feature, Katalin Varga (2009), is a rape/revenge story shot in Transylvania with exclusively Hungarian dialogue. His second feature, the metacinematic mystery Berberian Sound Studio (2012), is set in Seventies Italy and uses the grammar and tropes of giallo to explore the misogynies in and…