Denmark

Best known for his Dogme drama KIRA’S REASON and his historical film FLAME & CITRON, director Madsen turns his hand to screwball comedy, with Berthelsen (MIFUNE, ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS) a scruffy substitute for Cary Grant as the jilted husband conniving to win back his wife (Steen, as a high-powered sports agent) by any means necessary. He follows her to Buenos Aires, where he discovers that his rival is none other than Argentina’s biggest soccer star. Denmark’s official Academy Award submission for 2011. In Danish, Spanish, and English with English subtitles.

Some of the most acclaimed documentaries in the world (ARMADILLO, THE AMBASSADOR, THE RED CHAPEL, etc.) have been coming out of Denmark lately. Featured at the recent Sundance Film Festival, PUTIN’S KISS evokes Preston Sturges and Alexander Payne (especially ELECTION) in this sardonic yet ultimately touching portrait of Masha Drokova, an ambitious Russian teenager who attains insta-celebrity as “the girl who kissed Putin” and rises to power in Nashi, a controversial youth movement that supports Putin with Hitlerjugend-like fervor.

As he demonstrated with actress Paprika Steen in the 2011 EUFF entry APPLAUSE, writer-director Zandvliet knows how to showcase a powerhouse performance. Nikolaj Lie Kaas (THE IDIOTS, BROTHERS) evokes RAGING BULL and ALL THAT JAZZ with his ferocious, fact-based portrayal of Dirch Passer, who was Denmark's top comedy star of the 1950s-1960s, roughly the equivalent of America's Lou Costello or Jerry Lewis.

A guerrilla prankster experiment in the vein of BORAT and YES MEN, this disturbingly funny documentary concerns a cultural-exchange tour of North Korea by the Red Chapel, an alt-comedy team consisting of two Danish-Koreans--one of them, Jacob, a self-described "spastic." Filmmaker/manager Brügger sees the tour as an opportunity to puncture the pretenses of Kim Jong-il's regime ("Comedy is the soft spot of all dictators"), with the unpredictable and untranslatable Jacob as their secret weapon.

Paprika Steen, a mainstay of modern Danish cinema (THE CELEBRATION, MIFUNE, OPEN HEARTS), delivers a career performance in APPLAUSE. She plays Thea Barfoed, a stage actress whose current role as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is uncomfortably close to her offstage life. Alcoholic, sarcastic, an expert at burning bridges, she makes a desperate attempt to put her life back together in order to win back custody of her two sons from her ex-husband (Falch).