The Celebration
The Celebration • 1h 45m
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg • 1998 • Denmark
Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen
The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with THE CELEBRATION, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity. On a wealthy man’s sixtieth birthday, a sprawling group of family and friends convenes at his country estate for a celebration that soon spirals into bedlam, as bombshell revelations threaten to tear away the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath. The dynamic handheld camera work, grainy natural lighting, cacophonous diegetic sound, and raw performance style that would become Dogme hallmarks enhance the shattering visceral impact of this caustic indictment of patriarchal failings, which swings between blackest comedy and bleakest tragedy as it turns the sick soul of a family inside out.
Up Next in The Celebration
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THE CELEBRATION Commentary
This commentary track, recorded in 2005, features director Thomas Vinterberg.
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Last Round
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg • 1993 • Denmark
Starring Thomas Bo Larsen, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Martin BrygmannThis Student Academy Award–nominated short film by future Dogme 95 revolutionary Thomas Vinterberg displays his facility for rendering the raw-nerve emotional extremes of the human e...
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The Boy Who Walked Backwards
Presented here is a short film by Thomas Vinterberg. THE BOY WHO WALKED BACKWARDS (Drengen der gik baglæns, 1995) follows a young boy as he exhibits signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder following the death of his older brother. The film was a breakthrough for Vinterberg, winning the best drama ...
