05/03/2013 - Almost eight months after Cannes, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s award-winning feature finally reached Danish screens

The winner of seven international prizes, including three in Cannes and a European Film Award, Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile] was referred to a late premiere slot domestically – January 10, almost eight months after the launch on the Côte d’Azur. In return the Mads Mikkelsen starrer has made an extraordinary performance on the home market.

In only 27 days the Morten Kaufmann and Sisse Graum Jørgensen production for Zentropa Entertainments reached 500,000 admissions, to exceed Vinterberg’s so-far biggest local success, The Celebration, his 1998 Dogme film, which ended with 403,000. After almost eight weeks, still running on 55 screens, it had sold 637,191 tickets.

“It is almost against nature that the opening of a Danish contemporary drama on a serious subject takes 134,000 admissions, or the same as a US major blockbuster,” said managing director Jan Lehmann, of Nordisk Film Biograf Distribution – “and it is not less impressive how it continues to perform. It is a film everybody talks about and must see.”

Last week (March 1) The Hunt was released in Norway by Nordisk Film Distribusjon, and the expectant audience in the Norwegian festival city of Haugesund was somewhat surprised, when the local cinema started unspooling Norwegian director Erik Løchen’s The Chasers, with the Norwegian title of Jakten.

By mistake the operator at the digitised theatre had downloaded the Norwegian 1959 classic, which Løchen wrote, directed, edited, scored and launched at Cannes, instead of Vinterberg’s new premiere, whose Danish original title is Jagten. The hopeful spectators - who had their money refunded - were offered a later screening.

Photo:  Director Thomas Vinterberg (left) and actor Mads Mikkelsen (right)