The Building

It is autumn in the small Danish port of Nakskov. The last year of high school lies before Sara and her friends. They talk about the future, about the wish to leave to a bigger city. Karen just moved to the island to work as a teacher at the school. During class, Sara becomes fascinated.

Borrowing its title from an experimental text by Walter Benjamin. Many years ago, the cities by the river were gripped by a contagion. Things started to change and everything slowly became something else. It was not clear if transformation was a symptom of the disease or a way to escape it. The contagion touched everything and everyone: animals and plants, stones and soil, men, women and children, their thoughts, their dreams, their memories. An old woman once told me how all memories turn into trees, I could hardly make out what she was saying. She said she could hear the trees singing: To be a body, to be any body. After the years of contagion ended, the cities appeared untouched. One had to look hard to see the traces of the previous time. If one could listen to the trees, what would they say? A way out, a way out?

An affectionate, locally rooted portrait of the Danish town of Nakskov as a miniature model in the ratio of 1:50. The locals share their stories of class struggle over beers in the lunch break.

"House in the Lake" takes a look on an oppressive and intimate family. We follow the holidays in their remote summer house, the every day and the fragile normality, where the three kids absorb and partially channels the emotional energies of their parents.