A powerful, responsible, yet sensitive look at the experience of both survivors and offenders. A precursor to the similar American film, Sleepers. The showcase film of the Dogma 95 film group. The film takes place over the course of the 60th birthday celebration of a Danish patriarch whose children gradually reveal the family's history of incest. The treatment of denial and dissociation related to incest is so disturbingly faithful that the film's just outcome may seems optimistic.
Imagery carries the undramatized underside of the boy's experience.
An independent Canadian film about family dysfunction that fosters the abusive sexual initiation of a 15 year-old boy in a misguided homophobic reaction to the boy's budding homosexuality. Draws from magic realism to blend past and present in the portrayal of family dynamics. An incest drama that symptomatically draws the viewer into a web of deceits and displacements that mirror the sadism of a wounded Vietnam Vet. The sibling sexual abuse in this film appears early, as a prank, and is left incidental to the development of the boy protagonist. The American Hollywood version of the earlier Canadian film The Boy's of St. Vincent.