Talk:Festen/Archive 1

message: The Celebration is not birthday celebration, at least this is not essential, the essential celebration is the celebration of the listening to the avoided truth. 
I propose a new plot summary which focuses on Christian's character, not Helge's. Because without Christian's character (and his confrontation with the long-avoided truth that nobody - including himself - did not want to listen to) the Festen would be just yet another boring birthday party on movie. 
Despite aversive ignoring of basic obligations that any human society obliges any father with (not to abuse his own children), the Helge's character would keep enjoying the society's respect, as indeed many perpetrators of these kinds of crimes do in reality. But not in the Festen.
Christian's character's determination to confront the genetically programmed psychological responses such as self-victimizing loyalty of victims to their perpetrators (see Stockholm syndrome), such as denial, such as memory-avoidance (inappropriately called memory-repression, although it is avoidance), by confronting both his father, his wife (who happens to be Christian's mother) and the whole world, who never wanted to see the truth (Christian's mother once saw her husband sodomizing him as little boy, but did not protect him, she closed the door and pretended she saw nothing), nor wanted to listen to his painful story. 
(I wander how many of the victims of the childhood sexual abuse by their parental figures even try to talk about it, even to a psychotherapists if they look for a therapeutic help for some reason, and for how many of them it is too hard to bring it up to anybody at all and walk around emotionally dead until they die (emotionally they are already partly dead)...?).
 
Therefore I don't think "The story centers on Helge"! No! Maybe in real life everything revolves around perpetrators who are protected by the shield of truth-avoidance by the society and themselves, but in this movie this is happly not the case.
The perpetrator, "Helge is the subject of a family reunion..." and enjoys society's respect, only until his victim is not determined to tell the truth. In this movie Helge's character happens to be subjected to long-avoided truth. 
Festen is the celebration of truth, that all of them - including Christian - wanted to go away, but it did not go. His sister even committed suicide in order to kill her memories, and her story - because nobody in society wanted to listen. 
I disagree, too, that this celebration "is marred by the recent suicide of Helge's daughter and by ... Christian". Without Christian's determination to stop running from the truth, there would be no celebration of the truth at all, just yet another birthday party.
SloContributorSince2005 14:50, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Plot

message: Who is Søren Vinterberg, named in the "Basis in a radioshow hoax" section? He is not mentioned anywhere else in the article, and he does not seem to be mentioned in the original source () either. Is it just a typo for Thomas Vinterberg? — Emil J. 14:11, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: That seems likely. The cited source doesn't mention a "Søren" either. I have corrected it to "Thomas".--Saddhiyama (talk) 14:15, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Søren Vinterberg? 

message: The section concerning the inspiration (a radio hoax) begins with an incredible run-on sentence that is both confusing and vague. It'd be nice if someone who knew the details of this could tidy/clarify this section, as it is of interest.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.206.29.215 (talk) 19:00, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hoax 

message: Interesting for Gartner, but not significant for article. (Notable but trivial in relation to the film: Psychologist Richard Gartner reported in 1999 that The Celebration was one of only two feature films he had seen to feature male-male incest as a theme (the other film was the 1996 suspense-thriller Primal Fear). Additionally, Gartner suggests that the guests' responses to the disclosure of sexual abuse in The Celebration are a vivid depiction of denial.Gartner, Richard. 1999. Cinematic Depictions of Boyhood Sexual Victimization (page four of five). Gender and Psychoanalysis (1999) Volume 4:253-28. Archived from the original on August 19, 2009.) i recommend this be deleted, even though it has a citation.  That's not the only reason to keep content. Parkwells (talk) 23:08, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Trivia

message: I have changed The Celebration so it redirects to Festen, which the film is known by outside of the United States. The English-language play adaptation also uses the original Danish title, which influenced my decision that Festen was the correct title for the film.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrainSpecialist (talk • contribs) 17:28, 14 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Title