Festen
Tags: comedy, psychological, murder, paranormal, cult, violence, satire, plot twist

Plot synopsis:
Respected family patriarch and businessman Helge (Henning Moritzen) is celebrating his 60th birthday at the family-run hotel. Gathered together amongst many family and friends are his wife Else (Birthe Neumann), his sullen eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), his well-traveled daughter Helene (Paprika Steen), and his boorish younger son Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen). Christian's twin sister, Linda, has recently taken her life at the hotel.
Before the celebration dinner, Helene finds Linda's suicide note, but hides it in a medicine bottle after becoming upset by the contents (which are not revealed to the audience). Michael fights with his wife, whom he had earlier abandoned on the roadside with their three children, and then has sex with her. Michael later is pulled aside by a waitress with whom he had an affair (and had made pregnant) and then beats her when she disparages Helge. Later, during dinner, Christian makes a speech to the family in which he accuses his father Helge of sexually abusing him and his late sister Linda. There is an initial shocked silence, but the party gradually returns to normal, as the guests react by silent denial. In a private conversation in the pantry, a seemingly baffled Helge asks Christian about his motivations for slandering him, and Christian appears to recant his accusation. However, Christian is spurred to further action by hotel chef Kim (Bjarne Henriksen), a childhood friend who knows about the abuse. Christian then stands up and continues his toast by accusing Helge of causing Linda's death. Helge speaks to Christian alone and threateningly offers to announce in a toast Christian's troubled personal history, impotence with women and his perhaps inappropriately close relationship with his late sister, Linda. Christian says nothing in response to the threat. Further exacerbating the tensions of the day, Helene's black boyfriend Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah) shows up, enraging the racist Michael who later leads most of the partygoers in singing the Danish song "Jeg har set en rigtig negermand" in a racist way to offend him. During a toast, Else makes a series of back-handed compliments towards her children, accusing Christian of having an overactive imagination as a child and asking him to apologize for his earlier accusation. Christian responds by accusing her of interrupting Helge during one of the rapes, yet not interfering with the incident, and calling her a "cunt". Michael and two other guests violently eject Christian from the hotel. When Christian walks back in, they beat Christian and tie him to a tree in the nearby woods.
Christian unties himself and returns to the house. Helene has a headache and asks one of the waitresses (Pia) to go and fetch her pills. Pia finds Linda's suicide note in the medicine bottle and gives it to Christian. Christian gives the suicide note to Helene and leaves a note with the toastmaster. The toastmaster reads aloud the note that urges Helene to read the suicide note to the guests. Helene does so. Linda's note states that she decided to kill herself after feeling overwhelmed by dreams in which her father was molesting her again. In a fit of anger, Helge admits to the abuse in front of all the guests by saying that it was all Christian was good for. He then leaves the dining room with the guests stunned. Christian, who is drunk, faints after walking out of the dining hall and imagines seeing Linda. When he awakes, he learns from Helene that Michael is missing. We learn that the drunken Michael has called Helge outside and then beat his father severely, promising him that he will never see his grandchildren again.
Next morning shows the family (excluding the parents) and guests eating breakfast nonchalantly. Then Helge comes in and speaks to the group admitting his wrongdoing and declaring his love for his children. Michael coolly dismisses their father from the table, stating that he should now leave so that they can have breakfast. Christian reveals that he is going back to Paris, and asks Pia (who has known Christian for years) to accompany him.

Review: "Festen" aka "The Celebration" was the impressive directorial debut of the young Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg ("It's All About Love", "Dear Wendy"), and the first film made according to the rules of the daring Dogme 95 movement.
When we watch the only scene in which Christian weeps, with Gbatokai leaning over and giving moral support, it could almost pass for a candid moment in a homemade documentary.I've seen a lot of good family dramas, but rarely have I had such an urge to hug the main character and unleash profanity at several of the others..
I'm tired of watching films which try to make me feel sorry for rich kids whose parents just don't understand how hard it is to be a rich kid with pimples.As the families (one in ten?) with histories like this one can attest, being "dysfunctional" would have been a very happy place to be, compared to the reality as shown in this fine film..
Indeed with the hand-held camera the reality of the scene is intensified to such an extent one feels an integral part of the drama.It's a family celebration of father Helge's 60th birthday.
A very creative film that puts so much focus on the shadow side of us all, of Danes in particular that is so effective that it actually makes me sick, me, a person who's been watching violent movies since I was twelve and was hardly ever affected by it.
The rules of the Dogme 95 as the use of natural light, camera in the hands, etc, help to create a claustrophobic and confidential clime, like nobody knows that someone is filming them.
Paprika is a great actress and I can't stand waiting to watch "Idiotern", the second Dogme, in which she's acting again."Festen" is not just a worth watching film.
Though not if you think Armageddon is the best movie ever made but if you think character study, fantastic actors and a very strange feeling of disgust and fascination at the same time..
The characters are played expectionally well and the Dogme setting only makes it look like a home film gone horribly, horribly wrong.This film, although not entertaining, is excellent and deserves every award it recieves.The characters are strong and complex and the actors pull them through well.
All performances are stellar - from Ulrich Thomsen's Christian to the wonderful Paprika Steen's Helene, but for me, the performance of the film is by Henning Moritzen as the father, Helge, whose 60th birthday celebration it is which draws his whole family together.
I assure you that I have never experienced the grief of the antagonist, nor the suffering and redemption of the protagonist.Its first quality is that it is well written story (it is neither too incredible to be unbelievable, nor too familiar to be dull), secondly the characters are convincingly portrayed (only after watching several times do you realise that the actors react to their every social circumstance, regardless of whether it has been revealed to the audience or not), and thirdly I should mention the unique directorial style.
Having read about the film makers' "Dogme 95" charter I was expecting something pretty bizarre here but "Festen" (festival, celebration) co-written and directed by Thomas Vinterberg turned out to be the fairly orthodox tale of a traumatic family reunion.
Perhaps "no artistic egos were destroyed in the making of this film" but the impression I got was that somebody competent was in charge, albeit somebody with a taste for odd camera angles.The story centres around Christian, who travels back to the family country hotel (in Denmark) from his successful Paris restaurant to celebrate his father's 60th birthday.
I also liked Helmuth (Klaus Bondam), the Danish idea of the comic German toastmaster, who after some particularly shocking revelations at the dinner table manages to suggest dessert, coffee and dancing in the lounge - and the stunned guests meekly comply.There were hints of Bunuel in this movie ("there's nothing charming about the bourgeiose") and perhaps "Last Year in Marienbad." The spirit of Ingmar Bergman was not far away either.
He joined with Lars von Trier and two other Danish directors in endorsing a deed called Dogma 95, which was brought to light at Cannes and contracted them all to shoot on location, using only natural sounds and props found on such location, employing no special effects or music and working solely with hand-held cameras.
Ten years on and Festen (1998) remains a surprisingly radical piece of film-making; a work of daring drama that presents a story rich in the very basic need for intrigue and suspense, and tightly structured around a vast ensemble of characters brought together under the pretence of family.
However, the reason that the singular elements manage to come together and envelope us so successfully in a way that few films of recent years really do is down to the visual presentation of the text.Although Lars von Trier's The Idiots (1998) remains perhaps the most successful experiment in working within the confines of the Dogme 95 manifesto - with the limitations of conventional cinematic style used there to outwardly convey the search for inner purity and emotional simplification of the heartbroken central character - Festen's use of style works towards bringing the audience into the film, into the family; so that the darker, more mysterious elements of the script appeal more to our natural sense of curiosity and the voyeuristic nature that film, at its most basic level, presents.
Had this film been shot more conventionally, with glossy 35mm colour stock, elaborate lighting and ornate production design the story, characters and performances would have still worked, but the overall sense of intimacy and painful emotional suffocation simply wouldn't have been so searing.
The use of hand-held digital video, natural light, sloppy jump-cuts and lack of music create a sense of abstracted realism; tapping into images familiar from wedding videos or self-shot home-movie footage of birthdays, anniversaries, etc and making the audience almost a member of the proceedings (an innocent viewer, caught up in this painful family turmoil, or a co-conspirator, aware of every action the central character is about to make and implicit in his downfall).The scope of the story and the manner in which it is presented lends itself to this idea that what we are watching is somehow real; which offers the already engaging drama an uncomfortable feature that manages to question the very nature of what it is to be an audience.
Of course, at the back of our minds we're still aware that what we're watching has been created; with the artifice of self-shot video being a deconstructive element in itself, especially when combined with the disintegration of the facade of film-making further created by the strict rules of the Dogme.
It's pushed even further by the careful direction of Thomas Vinterberg, who has yet to produce a piece of work that comes anywhere near the effective brilliance and originality of the film in question.Although the influence of Dogme would wane somewhat within the next couple of years, being pronounced dead as early as 2002, the idea of removing all sense of obvious cinematic artifice in order push the emotional and psychological concerns of the story to the surface was an interesting one, and something that clearly worked, both for von Trier's provocative masterwork The Idiots and this fantastic film itself.
For me, Festen is one of the great films of the 90's; a continually gripping drama about families and their secrets and a modern-day Greek tragedy of epic proportions..
A danish extended family all get together at a large mansion in the country to celebrate the 60th birthday of the patriarch of the family which sort of has an unmentioned shadow over it since one of the family members recently came to a bad end in that same mansion.Rough germanic mannerisms create quite a stir of hilarious foul language with the comedy that comes from the different characters interpretation of what this day should mean and how they interact with each other.This is a rough flick in that it handles the idea of a large extended family protecting someone at the expense of a few of the other family members- a common and disturbing practice.
It was chilling to see the various family members lie through their teeth and rewrite history to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths about their own inaction.This movie's location reminded me of various large old hotels I have been to in Switzerland and the characters act very German but that's only because I don't really know what a Dane is, I just know Danish act very German in that they don't like to expose their personal affairs publicly and pull excessive stunts to avoid the appearance of being imperfect.
There's real manic, nervous, anxious energy to the whole piece, even when it's just two characters sitting down to talk, like early on when Christian, sort of the main character in this ensemble, is listening to his dad (or step-dad I guess) telling him something important before festivities begin (or the one who really kicks off the central conflict - that being the one being celebrated for his 60th birthday, good old dad).It's not really important; not like, say, the bombshell that Christian drops almost carefree during his toast at this big familial engagement at this country hous, or the fact that this is taking place just days after the death of his sister by suicide.
I'm a big fan of Lars Von Trier's films (apart from The Idiots) and I understand that he was part of the whole Dogme 95 wave of filmmaking which saw Danes making films on hand-held cameras, using no props and no false lighting.
It's a wonderful script which makes full use of its one-location idea and reveals its drama through character interactions which don't feel contrived in any way.I understand that Festen has been turned into a play and I can see why.
But a great film is a great film, whatever the rules under which it is made; and 'Festen' reminded me of Robert Altman's 'The Wedding', which begins with a long zoom shot from a static camera, the complete antithesis of the hand-held style that 'Dogme 95' dictates.'Festen' starts as a black comedy, the tale of the re-union of a highly dysfunctional family.
I watched this brave movie last night and thought it was fantastic in that the subject matter of how the painful realities of growing up in a family like this were brought to light in a creative way.
The use of "cheapening" filming effects, ie shaky hand held shots, which initially take some getting used to, ultra grainy shots and deliberate out-of-focus, ultimately allow the individual artist's performances to shine.This is as close as a film audience get to a movie, and the viewers emotions move not just up and down, but left, right and every which way - rapidly.
It is both very funny and very tragic, and when watching this movie emotions will change rapidly.Great actors especially Henning Mouritzen and Ulrich Thomsen which are confronted during the film..
Thomas Vinterberg's heinously underhyped film engages in the usual paradox of the Dogme film: that is, by using hand-held cameras, producing sound and picture together, eschewing studio lighting, costuming, music, and in many other ways attempting to strip away the apparatus of artificiality that purportedly stands between a film and its audience, the Dogme films in fact call attention to their own filmic-ness, simply by being outside the parameters that our eyes and ears have been accustomed to translating into a sense of naturalness.
Watching Festen was the strongest cathartic experience I've had this year at the movies, and I think the natural film shooting policies Vinterberg has adopted have paid off here in making it seem like a real story with real people that you care about.
They can happen in any family (provided that the patriarch is like the movie character).So if you're looking for a great experience (as stated above by the other reviewer) you're in for a treat.
It is a great film that follow the guidelines of Dogme 95 to perfection and it keeps you nailed to the screen.I've seen a lot of movies.
Like a macabre travesty, the horrors that are revealed are stifled beneath the stiff upper lip of black tie and bravado, until the only celebration is one of confronting truth.Director Thomas Vinterberg achieves remarkable results within the strict remit of the rather arbitrary 'Dogme95' rules of minimalist film-making.
Everything is shot with a domestic video camera in low light or candlelight - looking rather like a home movie about a family gathering.
He says, "The characters played by Ulrich Thomsen and Thomas Bo Larsen arise from my fascination with James Caan and Al Pacino in The Godfather, and Moritzen's patriarch was of course inspired by good old Marlon, not that I'm making any comparisons, of course."Almost a parallel to the Dogme revolution against style over substance and the abuse of art by Hollywood, Celebration is cinema at its most powerful but without reliance on technical wizardry or artifice.
By turns harrowing and funny, it's not the sort of story that would normally draw me (affluent family disintegrates under the weight of revelations made by its adult children, during a weekend celebration of the father's sixtieth birthday); but I was spellbound by the acting, script and grainy, naturalistic camera work (and NYPD fans, please take note: THIS is the way to handle the 'moving camera').If thought-provoking film is what you're after, please try Festen.
Forget the Dogme film style, which does suit this film better than perhaps other situations; the main puller here is the drama between the "underground" and the family, while Christian's story is attempting it's way through the party.
Another good interpretation made by Thomas Bo Larsen who played as Michael.Finally I have to say that "The Celebration" is a classic drama movie which represents many families which have many secrets between its members.
In 2003 the man from the radio show had changed his story to announce that he had made it up and that none of the events had taken place.As for the movie itself, this was not Thomas Vinterberg's debut, but his first film following the Dogme-95-concept.
Not to say that since I didn't recognize anyone or know about the movie it and they weren't great, it is quite the opposite that is true, I was really amazed by how awesome this movie was.I don't want to spoil it but it is basically a big dinner party with an entire family there to celebrate but instead a terrible family secret is opened up after all these years.A really great story with superb acting that you should not miss, but the subject matter is definitely for mature audiences only so keep the kids away!.
It's directed by Danish film director Thomas Vinterberg and is the first movie created under the Dogme95 rules.
It tells the story about a Danish restaurant owner named Christian who lives in Paris, France and who returns to his homeland where his mother named Elsie, his sister named Helene and her friend named Gbatokai, his brother named Michael and his wife named Mette and their three children, his friend named Pia, a waitress named Michelle, a chef named Kim and many other guests are getting prepared at a grand conference hotel where they are to spend the day and night celebrating his father named Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen's 60th anniversary.Distinctly and brilliantly directed by Nordic filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg, this finely paced fictional tale which is narrated from multiple viewpoints though mostly from the main character's point of view, draws an uncanny and throughout engaging portrayal of a son who has kept a family secret ever since his childhood, an uninvited brother who gets into a dispute with his sister's new boyfriend and a waitress with a crush on one of the family members who notices that one of the female guests is flirting with her.
While notable for it's distinct and naturalistic milieu depictions, fine cinematography by English cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, editing by Icelandic film editor Valdis Oskarsdottir and use of sound, colors and light, this dialog- driven and narrative-driven story about family relations and traditions which became Thomas Vinterberg's initiation into cinema history and where the distinctions between truths and lies becomes very evident, depicts several dense and interrelated studies of character and contains a timely song sung by the mother of the man at the center of the party with the lyrics : "There is an idyllic quiet peace".This dramatic, situational and darkly humorous social satire from the late 1990s which is set at a hotel in Denmark during a summer in the 20th century and where a light-hearted and inspirited celebration becomes a shock after the eldest son has asked his father to choose between a green and a yellow speech and all of the guests car keys vanishes, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, substantial character development, efficient continuity, variegated characters, versatile perspectives, the words in a letter : "Dear whoever finds this letter", the prominent acting performance by Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen, the hilarious, unsettling and authentic acting performance by Danish actor Thomas Bo Larsen, the charming acting performance by Danish actress Trine Dyrholm and the fine acting performances by Danish actresses Paprika Steen, Helle Dolleris, Therese Glahn, actor Gbatokai Dakinah and Danish actors Henning Moritzen and Lars Brygmann.
This film is about a birthday celebration being ripped apart by a shocking revelation of a deeply buried family secret.I like the plot a lot, because it is simple, and yet profoundly affecting.
There are many more scenes worth high-lighting, but these three are great examples.Everything works in FESTEN: the fully-developed three-dimensional characters, the acting, the innovative hand-held Dogme95 camera style, Vinterberg's and Mogens Rukov's manuscript.
acted in a natural way so when the movie is over you feel like being part of the family.