26/09/2011

Danish director Ole Christian Madsen’s Superclásico [+see also:
trailer
film profile] will enter the race to be nominated for the Academy Award as Best Foreign-Language Feature – the trophy that his compatriot Susanne Bier’s In a Better World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] collected earlier this year. The Danish Oscar committee, headed by Oscar-winning producer Per Holst (Pelle the Conqueror) preferred Superclásico to Martin Zandvliet’s A Funny Man [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Family, which were also on the shortlist.

A comedy of marital discord, the film, scripted by Madsen and Anders Frithiof August is the story of a 40-year-old man who travels to Buenos Aires with his 16-year-old son to make his soon-to-be ex-wife sign the divorce papers – with the secret wish to win her back. ”I learned that I had yet to tell thes tory of all the absurd and funny aspects of my own and others’ lives that I find myself laughing at,” said Madsen after his third feature about love and break-ups.

Starring Anders W Berthelsen, Paprika Steen and Jamie Morton, Superclásico was produced by Lars Bredo Rahbek and Signe Leick Jensen for Nimbus Film, with support from the Danish Film Institute. Released earlier this year by Sandrew Metronome Distribution Finland Oy Ab, it took 185,000 admissions domestically; sold internationally by Germany’s Match Factory, it had its North American première at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

A member of the so-called ’golden cohort’ at the Danish National Film School in the early 1990s, with Thomas Vinterberg and Per Fly, Madsen’s most recent feature was the World War II drama Flame & Citron [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which sold 673,000 tickets in Denmark. The five 2012 Oscar nominations for Best Foreign-Language Feature will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on January 24 ahead of the 84th ceremony on February 26.