Nothing can ever be the same again.
Paternal loyalties fall away, and truth turns in new and unsettling directions.
Directed by a young Danish director, Thomas Vinterberg, the film is an extraordinary depiction of a night of family truth telling. It is summertime, hot and yellow in the Danish countryside, and the extended Klingenfeldt clan gather to honour the sixtieth birthday of the family patriarch, Helge, at his elegant country house hotel. They have barely begun to enjoy the evening banquet when Helge's eldest son, Christian, is invited to make a toast and reveals that his father is in fact a paedophile, whose relentless sexual abuse of Christian and his twin sister as children drove her to suicide and him to despair. Festen is a deeply disturbing film. It also looks and feels very different.