30/10/2013 - Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson’s award-winning Of Horses and Men and another 159 Nordic, Baltic and German films will screen at the largest showcase of Nordic cinema outside Scandinavia

Freshly bestowed with two awards for Best Director – at the international film festivals in San Sebastian and Tokyo – Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson’s feature debut, Of Horses and Men [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
film profile] (photo), will tonight (October 30) open the 55^th Nordic Film Days in Lübeck, the largest showcase of Nordic cinema outside Scandinavia.

Also Iceland’s submission for the Oscar nomination as Best Foreign-Language Feature, Erlingsson’s country romance about the human streak in the horse and vice versa (or fortunes of people in the countryside as seen through the eyes of a horse) will be introduced by the director, lead actors Ingvar E Sigursson, Charlotte Bøving and producer Fridrik Thór Fridriksson (himself a director, Oscar-nominated for Children of Nature/1991).

This year the festival’s artistic director Linde Fröhlich has selected 160 films from the Nordic and Baltic countries, adding the region of Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein for the five-day programme, which will also be visited by Danish director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen (with The Hour of the Lynx [+see also:
trailer
film profile]), Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (We Are The Best! [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), Danish director Per Fly (with his Swedish biopic of singer-actress Monica Zetterlund, Waltz for Monica) and Icelandic director Regnar Bragason (Metalhead).

“What is interesting about Nordic cinema is that it has a great variety of genres, and currently a lot of young, upcoming directors about to find their own personal voices in the international filmmaking landscape,” said Fröhlich, who chose four Finnish contenders for the main competition (and the €12,500 NDR Film Prize), three each from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and two from Iceland.

However, Norway is the strongest supplier for the 2013 edition, with 37 titles on the schedule – 12 screening in the North!wards: Spitsbergen and the Path to the Pole retrospective (which is even more freezing than last year’s Cold Horror – Shudders and Dread from the North). Two new documentaries, Stein-Roger Bull’s The Sun and Dheeraj Akolkar’s Let the Scream Be Heard, about Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), will celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Munch, who had strong bonds to Lübeck.

Screening at Lübeck’s CineStar Filmpalast Stadthalle, the Kolosseum and KoKi theatres, the Nordic Film Days also include special programmes for children and young audiences, different selections of shorts and documentaries, New Narrative Forms between Art and Politics (documentaries), the Filmforum (German filmmakers) and the Lübeck Meetings, the industry convention for film professionals (October 31-November 1).