08/11/2012 - The Amazonas Film Festival tries Scandinavian cinema with Danish filmmaker Mads Matthiesen's feature debut

Yesterday a new species joined the already very diverse group of Amazonian fauna: a bear in the form of a bodybuilder who, from the big screen, thrilled the audience at the ninth Amazonas Film Festival. His name is Kim Kold and he is the main character in Teddy Bear [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Danish filmmaker Mads Matthiesen's feature debut that is also the first European film to have been screened at the festival in Manus this year (read more).

Teddy Bear tells the story of Dennis, an insecure bodybuilder in his thirties looking for the love of his life and who, along the way, will have to rid himself of his extreme dependency on his mother. Matthiesen developed the story from a short film, Dennis, that he had directed years before and in which Kold had already played the character of Dennis for the first time. In the transition to feature format, the director kept his character's shyness and muscles, but decided to increase his dramatic potential by structuring the plot around two central themes: romantic love, on one hand, and maternal love, on the other.

Incapable of finding his other half in Denmark (and inspired by his uncle, who met his wife in Thailand), our Teddy bear travels to Pattaia full of romantic ideals. But once there he quickly realises that love has a "price", which is problematic because Dennis is quite the opposite of Margarethe Tiesel's character in Paradise: Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]: Sex tourism is not his thing. Luckily, and after an initial disaster, Dennis however ends up meeting a Thai girl with no money. In love, he decides to take her back to Denmark and move in with her, even if this means moving out of home and leaving his manipulative mother (veteran actress Elsebeth Steentoff) alone.

With a mixed cast of professional and amateur actors, who are all more than credible, what most impresses in Teddy Bear is Kold's magnetic presence. His body works both as an element of comedy, in contrast to his girlfriend and mother's tiny bodies, and of tragedy, in contrast to his character's emotional fragility. This fragility is conveyed in Dennis' anxious view of loneliness, which impresses us almost as much as his muscles.

Without ever deviating from a realistic tone, Matthiesen manages to build a delicate balance between intimate drama and family melodrama, with the odd subtle wink to romantic comedies. The result is a positive story of overcoming one's fears and emotional obstacles that has already earned the director an award from the last Sundance Film Festival and, more recently, a nomination for the European Film Academy Awards (read more).

(Translated from Spanish)