Lindholm goes to war in Afghanistan, with real soldiers
- Tobias Lindholm’s third feature follows a Danish commander at a war-crime trial as he also struggles to keep his family together
Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm will shortly wrap principal photography in Denmark and Turkey for A War [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tobias Lindholm
film profile], his third feature, which is just as strongly rooted in reality as A Hijacking [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tobias Lindholm
film profile], his award-winning 2012 drama-thriller, which was named Best Danish Feature by both the Danish Film Critics and the Danish Film Academy.
Also scripted by Lindholm, A War follows a Danish Army commander, Claus Michael Pedersen, posted in Helmand province, Afghanistan. At home, his wife tries to carry on as best she can with life together with their three children – he can only call her once a week. And he is himself arrested, accused of war crimes: on a routine mission, and to save his men during a gunfight with the Taliban, he orders that the area be bombed – and the bodies of 11 Afghan women and children are found amongst the ruins of the buildings.
When Pedersen (Pilou Asbæk) returns to Denmark, he finds himself in the middle of a court trial and a private battle to save his family. In the film, lead actors Asbæk and Søren Malling, who were both in A Hijacking, are joined by Tuva Novotny, Charlotte Munck, Dar Salim and Dulfi Al-Jaburi; the soldiers performing in the film are real Danish troopers who have been deployed to Afghanistan.
Having co-written Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Submarino [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile] (2010) and the Oscar-nominated The Hunt [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile] (2012) – which collected 40 prizes, including a European Film Award and the Nordic Council Film Prize – as well as the upcoming The Commune [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Thomas Vinterberg
film profile] (read the news), Lindholm also supplied the scripts for Danish directors Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s The Hour of the Lynx [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2013) and Roni Ezra’s April 9 [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2015), adding Danish pubcaster DR’s TV series Borgen (2008-2011) to his impressive list of credits.
On The War, Lindholm has worked with his regular team, consisting of cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, editor Adam Nielsen and sound engineer Morten Green. René Ezra and Tomas Radoor have staged the project for Nordisk Film Production, and Nordisk Film Biografdistribution will release the movie in Scandinavia during autumn 2015. Paris-based StudioCanal is in charge of international sales.
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