Carsten Brandt

Max (Søltoft) is a popular teacher at a public school who needs a new schoolmaster. In an effort to entice him to take the vacated position, the boys hire a stripper to seduce the sexually inexperienced scholar. The wife and daughter of the former headmaster also wish to tutor the teacher in their own private lessons in human sexuality.

A drama about a group of women preparing to give birth who meet and bond at the hospital. Based on the best-selling Danish novel by Dea Trie Moerch and directed by acclaimed Danish filmmaker Astrid Henning-Jensen, "Winterborn" was considered one of the best movies of the decade in Denmark.

One can't help wondering whether, some quarter-century ago, Carsten Brandt had the slightest inkling of the epic dimension the project he was then starting to conceive – The Gentle Pain – would take on in the subsequent decades. For it became epic in just about every sense of the word: the film is very long; it tells a multi-layered story characterised as much by its digressions as by its main narrative thread, which concerns a filmmaker’s attempts to make sense of the life of Thorkild Hansen, a Danish traveller/historian/writer internationally probably best known for his non-fiction novel Processen mod Hamsun (1978); and it took a long time to finish – and then sat on a shelf due to legal battles galore. What is now finally revealed is a monument of modern(ist) cinema: a work that as much charts one man’s journey into his soul as a voyage of discovery into another artist’s mind.