Oscar-winning director Bille August in Prague for 10th SCANDI festival
The annual SCANDI film festival, curated by Prague’s Edison Filmhub, showcases the best of contemporary Nordic cinema. For this year’s edition, Academy Award and two-time Cannes winning Danish director Bille August is in attendance to promote his latest work, The Kiss. I caught up with him ahead of the film's screening.
Back in 2015 you said that the more Nordic cinema is, the more popular it’s become, and that staying true to that genre has brought much success. Do you still feel the same way today?
“I think film in general has become more international in the sense of the storytelling. What I think is unique about Nordic films is the way of storytelling, but also the light, the way we live with the dramatic changes of seasons. In the winter it’s cold, it’s almost a monochromatic world with snow everywhere, and the lack of ability to meet others because of the cold, but in the summer, all emotion comes out and it’s very colourful. I think these changes have a big impact on the way we live and our culture.”
Tell me a bit about your latest film The Kiss.
“The Kiss is a novel by Stefan Zweig, and I read it five years ago. Someone had asked me if I was interested in making an international production of it in English. Some legal problems came up with the producer and the production companies, and we couldn’t make it, but I loved the story so much I thought why couldn’t we turn this into a story that takes place in Denmark? So we made it a Danish film.
“It’s about this poor young man that has borrowed money to get an education. It’s very important to him to get a military education, where it’s all about honour. He’s invited to this castle where there lives a disabled woman, and he cannot figure out if he’s in love with her, or if it’s his pity and compassion for her that is playing tricks with him. The story questions if pity can be confused with love, or if love can be mixed up with pity. And I really like this theme, because it says something about the complexity of love.”
Why do you think events like the SCANDI film festival here in Prague are important, in terms of showcasing different European cinemas to different countries across the continent?
“Today, it’s very tough for distributors to import non-English speaking films, and before, you could always find cinemas or distributing companies that would take the risk to import a Czech, French, or Italian film. But today, because of all these multiplex movie theatres, it’s almost always about maverick films.
"I think festivals can really shed a light on the fact that there are a lot of interesting films being made all over Europe and around the world. It’s just the reality now that it’s hard to find the distribution for foreign language films.”
Since we’re here in Prague I thought I would ask, are there any Czech filmmakers, past or contemporary, that you admire?
“When I was young and trying to figure out what to do with my life, I saw films by Jiří Menzel and Miloš Forman, and that really inspired me so much and made me decide I wanted to be a filmmaker – it came from Czechoslovakia. These two directors – what they did back then was absolutely amazing, masterpieces. I think it had a lot of influence on how European cinema developed from then on.
"Of course there were other important directors like François Truffaut in Europe that came to represent this new wave of thinking and making movies. I had the pleasure of meeting both Menzel and Forman when they were still alive, and they were wonderful people.”
