Can this be true?
To begin with the guests simply don't believe Christian. They are dismissive and try to make him apologise for his behaviour. But doubt begins to gnaw and soon the celebration gets out of hand. The final proof that Christian is speaking the truth is provided by the dead sister. She left a farewell letter, which is found during the celebration and read out aloud to all the guests (see clip).
Dogma freedom
Many people laughed when Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995 launched Dogme 95 (Dogma 95). It seemed comic that dogma directors were forced to comply with 10 strict, almost primitive rules: hand-held camera, no artificial light, shooting on location and so on. (See also presentation of Lars von Trier's film The Idiots (Idioterne). But the critics soon stopped laughing when results began to show and The Celebration won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998.
According to Thomas Vinterberg, the script for The Celebration, which was written along with Mogens Rukov, more or less wrote itself and the application of the dogma rules to the making of the film acted in no way as a constraint, quite the contrary. Von Trier's dogma rules allow the actors to move freely, with the camera following them, ever curious and seeking. The mobility and closeness of the camera is precisely what places the audience in the middle of the action. We become part of the drama.
Golden age of Danish film
The Celebration abounds in scathing satire and exciting drama. The film is key to the success that Danish film has experienced nationally and internationally since the mid-1990s. And Thomas Vinterberg ranks among the best of young Danish film-makers intent on telling a good story about their own generation to their own contemporaries.
The Celebration became one of the most successful dogma films abroad. It has been set up as a play all over the world, most recently in New York on Broadway. Dogma 95 helped to pave the way for the democratisation of production technology in film-making, brought about by the use of digital cameras.
Christian Monggaard is a film reviewer and critic for the daily newspaper Information.
Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) and his famous speech in The Celebration (Festen). Photo: Lars Høgsted. Producent: Nimbus Film ©.