DOGMA 95

Lecture by Norbert Wehrstedt on the manifesto "Dogma 95" and its influence on today's filmmaking and screening of "Mifune" (1999)

Was it all just shaky cam? Was it all just a cry for attention? Or had cinema come so hard on the SF, fantasy, action and clothes dog that the time was ripe for a departure for new shores? To realistic cinema. To stories in which everyday life lives. To characters who could be neighbors. To cinematic adventures that make banal life blossom on the screen as exciting as it is. Told in such a way that you hold your breath - because they really breathe.

On March 20, 1995 at the Odeon Theater in Paris, four Danes proclaimed the birth of true and genuine cinema through rules that celebrated one thing above all: restriction. Handheld camera, standardized image, never genre, music that only takes place in the scenes and stories that celebrate social reality - with people of flesh and blood who speak like people of flesh and blood. "Das Fest", "Idioten", "Mifune", "Italienisch für Anfänger", "Für immer und ewig" - one gem followed another. Soon there were followers all over the world. Cinema became art - and art became cinema.

Why was this renewal born in Denmark of all places? Why back then, in the mid-90s? And why did its four fathers declare the end of Dogma 95 ten years later - and continue to make great films. But now without all the rules. What remains of the great cinematic awakening on the 100th anniversary of cinema? What lives on? Has today's film taken anything from the Nordic new wave? Or has it simply seeped away in the sands of a cinema of pleasing arbitrariness?

The film "Mifune" (1999) by Soren Kragh-Jacobsen will then be shown.

Kresten is doing well. He is established in his profession and married young. Then he receives the news of his father's death. Kresten goes back to Lolland to look after his disabled brother. There he hires a housekeeper. But she is a luxury call girl from Copenhagen who has fled from telephone terror. Kresten doesn't know this, of course. The fledgling marriage breaks down and Kresten falls in love with the supposed housekeeper.

Denmark 1999 by Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, 98 min, Danish original version with German subtitles. Subtitles, FSK 12
Cast:inside: Iben Hjejle, Anders W. Berthelsen, Sofie Gråbøl