Mændenes Forbund

Christian is a nice man climbing the career ladder. His brother Mikael, on the other hand, is a petty criminal who hustles his way through life as best he can. When Mikael dies, Christian feels responsible and, in order to get to know his deceased brother better, he seeks out the underworld Mikael belonged to. He should never have done that.

A documentary view of the Basque ball-game in which a small hard leather ball is hit against a wall. The film gives an impression of the game itself and of those who play it, not only the star performers (and the myths that surround them), but also those who just play in the streets and alleyways. The film sees the game it its cultural context and conveys the emotions and stories that are peculiar to the Basque country.

A man decides to perpetrate a series of killings and publicise them as political acts in an attempt to protest against nuclear armaments.

Despite its suggestive title, this multi-part Danish omnibus film is not a work of exploitation. Instead, it presents 20 different short films (back-to-back) on the general theme of Danish women, directed by filmmakers including Krzysztof Zanussi, Monika Treut, Gustav Hamos, David Blair, Vibeke Vogel, Dusan Makavejev, Morten Skallerud and Lars Norgaard. Some dramatic vignettes mix with other comedic ones, but all are offbeat and experimental. The picture includes one animated sequence (by Norgaard).

'Ang.: Lone' is a sort of social realist 'rebellious teen movie'. It tells the story of a troubled, emotionally confused, and defiant 16-year-old girl called Lone. Lone runs away from a girls' home in Jutland and travels to the home of her foster parents. Her visit quickly gives rise to a conflict so she travels onward to Copenhagen. In Copenhagen she enters into lower and middle class milieus and the hippiesque underground, but she runs away from each of these because she manages to start conflicts with most people by acting aggressively aggrieved. Lone finds a boyfriend and becomes pregnant during the couple of months she spends in Copenhagen before she is found and placed in a mothers' home which she eventually runs away from in order to have an illegal abortion.

Jørgen Leth can squeeze poetry from a stone and wit from dust, and he can find love where the milk of human kindness runs dry. In a series of tableaux of Life in Denmark, he carries absurdism to a happy extreme. To act out his minuscule non-dramas, he uses a motley crew of professional actors like Ghita Nørby and Claus Nissen, writer Dan Turéll plus a snake charmer, a bicycle racer and a circus queen.

He has recently divorced and found a new love. But when his ex-wife also finds a new lover, who is cold and harsh toward their two small children, it is difficult for the ex-couple to cope with the situation.

The biannual management conference at the company 'Danoon' takes an unexpected turn when one of the sales managers brings a strange girl to the hotel.

Mikkel is given the opportunity to advance to deputy director of the company, and now the director has invited Mikkel and his wife to dinner at his home. Mikkel relies on certain unwritten rules and on himself. The latter is the most problematic.

The ABCinema group dispatched Jørgen Leth to make the arrangements with Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag, who good-naturedly put himself at their disposal. Relaxing on a bench in the garden of Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Krag is scrutinised by camera-wielding collective members almost like a model in a life-drawing class. Every possible angle, distance and framing is tried. The result is an image of the prime minister that is both fragmented and multi-facetted, describing his visual appearance as a man and an icon. At the same time, the ABCinema members film each other filming Krag, which gives the film a highly self-reflective character. Like "The Deer Garden," this is a film about a film being filmed. A showdown with the documentary portrait genre, "Jens Otto Krag" is devised according to the principle of keeping the material alive by not editing it but randomly piecing it together. (DFI)