This week Palace Byron invites you to warm your mid-winter with the Carlsberg Scandinavian Film Festival. The full 2022 programme has been revealed featuring a superb selection of the best new cinema from the Nordic region and will be screening at Palace Cinemas Byron Bay from 22 July to 10 August 2022.
This year’s specially curated selection encompasses films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden with a number arriving direct from this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Opening the Festival is the Australian Premiere of Margrete – Queen of the North (Margrete den første), a lavish historical drama set in 1402 from acclaimed director Charlotte Sieling. It explores the legacy and dilemmas faced by Denmark’s Queen Margrete (played by the brilliant Trine Dyrholm) a visionary ruler who brokered the historic Kalmar Union; uniting Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
Dyrholm also stars in A Matter of Trust (Ingen kender dagen), a tender and moving portrait of interpersonal trust and unspoken truths. Five stories intertwine in Annette K. Olesen’s artful, elliptical, and bittersweet relationship drama, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.
Selected for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week, this year’s Special Presentation is Finland’s The Woodcutter’s Story (Metsurin tarina), the directorial debut of Mikko Myllylahti. In an idyllic village, Pepe the woodcutter’s quiet life is suddenly torn apart by a series of tragic events over the course of a few days, but he seems to be fine with it as if he holds a secret to existence that is hard to grasp.
Closing the festival is The New Land (Nybyggarna), – the 1972 sequel to the original The Emigrants (Utvandrarna), – starring cinema legends Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as Swedish immigrants who struggle to establish a new life for themselves in the forest of Minnesota in the mid 19th Century. In 1973, the film was nominated for an Oscar and won Best Foreign Language film at the Golden Globes and in 2022 celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.
The Emigrants (2021) (Utvandrarna) from Sweden is famed director Erik Poppe’s new adaptation of the 1971 award-winning classic, which closed the 2021 Festival. Starring Lisa Carlehed and Gustav Skarsgård, it follows the emigrants’ journey from Sweden to the United States in the mid 1800s, telling the story for the first time from Kristina’s perspective.
For food lovers A Taste of Hunger (Smagen af sult) is the story of a couple who sacrifice everything to get a coveted Michelin star for their popular restaurant in Copenhagen starring Katrine Greis-Rosenthal and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
This is just the tip of the Scandinavian Film Festival – there are so many great movies, you just can’t not go!
Tickets are now on sale at www.scandinavianfilmfestival.com