23/04/2014 - Jonas Arnby Alexander's feature debut, When Animals Dream, will screen in the Cannes sidebar for first or second features

When Animals Dream by Jonas Arnby Alexander

Ten years after Danish director Jonas Arnby Alexander filmed his latest short, he is back with his feature debut, When Animals Dream [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jonas Alexander Arnby
film profile], which has been selected as one of the seven entries in the Critics’ Week at the Cannes International Film Festival. A 2004 graduate from Copenhagen’s alternative film school, Super16, Alexander has worked with commercials and music videos since 1995.

A rare horror film from Denmark “about a 16-year-old girl's liberation and revenge against an outside world that humiliates, despises and fears her”, Rasmus Birch’s script follows teenager Marie, who is beautiful, lonely and lives in an isolated village on a small island off the west coast of Denmark. Marie's mother is seriously ill, suffering from an unknown disease – she is on medication, absent-minded and confined to a wheelchair. Her father, the local grocer, tries to make life as normal as possible for the small family. On the surface, everything seems fine – and yet, Marie cannot help feeling that he is hiding something about her mother's illness. At the same time, she senses that something strange is happening to her body – that she is losing control of herself.

Lars Mikkelsen, Sonja Richter and newcomer Sonia Suhl play the leads in the Caroline Schlüter Bingestam and Ditte Milsted production for Alphaville Pictures Copenhagen, with support from the Danish Film Institute. When Animals Dream will be domestically released during the summer, and Paris-based Gaumont International Sales is handling the launch on the Côte d’Azur. Besides the prize in the Critics’ Week sidebar for first and second features, it will be competing for the festival’s Caméra d’Or for Best Feature Debut.