Danish film critics celebrate Another Round and local cinemas

Saturday’s on-sight Bodil awards ceremony at Copenhagen’s Folketeatret was a cheerful event, just two days after the reopening of Danish cinemas and the first time the Danish industry could gather since the pandemic started.

As anticipated, Zentropa’s Oscar-winning film Another Round bagged three Bodils for Best Film, Best Screenplay (co-written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm) and Best Actor for Mad Mikkelsen.

Malou Reymann’s A Perfectly Normal Family produced by Nordisk Film made history with the 13 year-old Kaya Toft Loholt collecting a Best Actress award, making her the youngest ever female acting talent to win the prize. Reymann also picked up a Talent Award for her debut feature.

The Good Traitor by Christina Rosendahl won Best Cinematography (Louise McLaughlin) and the Henning Bahs award for Best Production Design (Rie Lykke).

Sidse Babett Knudsen was voted Best Supporting Actress for her role in Wildland by Jeanette Nordahl, Lars Brygmann Best Supporting Actor for Riders of Justice by Anders Thomas Jensen, and Mira Jargil’s Reunited won Best Documentary film.

In a highly symbolic move, the Danish film critics chose to hand out this year’s Honorary Bodil Award to Danish cinemas, which just opened their doors May 6 after four months of closure. “When you, like us Danish film critics, live part of our lives in the cinemas, it has been really difficult to suddenly become homeless for as many months as we have been, during the corona crisis. Of course, the entire film industry has suffered from the shutdowns both last year and this year. But cinemas have been hit particularly hard,” said the film critics in their motivation statement…”Cinemas can do so much, give so much. We knew this well before the coronavirus hit, but it has become even clearer during the shutdown. Therefore, it is incumbent on us to show how much we appreciate all the Danish cinemas and the unique experiences that you offer,” said the members of the Danish Film Critics Association.

Meanwhile this year’s Special Bodil Award recipient was producer Katja Adomeit of Adomeit Film. The Danish film critics praised her flair for producing foreign talents such as New Zealand's Daniel Borgman, Sweden’s Anna Eborn and Afghan Sharhbanoo Sada, and co-producing Ruben Östlund’s The Square and Force Majeure among others. The critics also underscored “her courage to go her own way with narrow films”, for instance by crowdfunding Sharhbanoo Sadat's film Wolf and Sheep, and putting Annika Berg's Team Hurricane on VOD when it was “still considered a really neckless act.”

Finally the prizes for Best American Film went to Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse and Best Non-US Foreign Film to the French film Portrait of a Lady on Fire by Céline Sciamma.

The 74th Bodil awards ceremony was hosted by actor/writer/singer Emma Sehested Høeg (Limboland).

For further information, check: www.bodilprisen.dk