Danish Films Make Comeback With Awards

A double triumph by Danish movie makers has put Denmark’s cinema industry back on the international map after decades on the sidelines.

“Pelle the Conqueror,” the story of a young boy’s difficult upbringing in 19th-Century rural Denmark, starring Swedish actor Max von Sydow, became the first Danish movie to win the top Golden Palm award at the recent Cannes Film Festival.

In another first for Denmark, “Babette’s Feast,” about a French cook who serves an unforgettable banquet for the people of a remote village in western Denmark, took the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in April. (“Babette’s Feast” moves to the new Edwards Hutton Centre theater in Santa Ana beginning today.)

“I am very happy and proud on behalf of the Danish film industry. The film industry over the last years has been growing in quality and self-consciousness,” Danish Culture Minister Hans Peter Clausen said.

Denmark has a long cinema tradition, claiming the world’s oldest film production company still in operation (the Nordisk Filmkompagni, founded in 1906), which owns the oldest movie studio still in use, at Valby in Copenhagen.

But since the death of director Carl Dreyer, who made films from 1920 to 1955, the nation’s film industry made little impact on the international scene until the latest awards.

Danish Film Institute director Finn Aabye said it was not easy for a land of only 5 million people to compete with bigger countries that have more money available.

“It makes it always difficult and heavy going for a little nation,” he said. His institute distributes an annual $9.2 million in state support to Danish film makers, who currently produce a dozen films a year.

Language presents another barrier to selling the films abroad, as Danish is less accessible than English or French to most countries outside Scandinavia.

“It is a drawback for our films, for our literature. That is why we are interested in programs in the European Community and the European Council for support for smaller countries with subtitles and translation,” Clausen said.

Both “Pelle the Conqueror,” directed by Bille August, and “Babette’s Feast,” directed by Gabriel Axel and starring French actress Stephane Audran, had excellent scripts taken from Danish classical literature.