The Celebration / Festen (1998) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Thomas Vinterberg (uncredited)
Writer: Thomas Vinterberg (screenplay), Mogens Rukov (screenplay)
Stars: Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen

The Danish Dogme 95 movement that struck world cinema like a thunderbolt began with The Celebration, Thomas Vinterberg’s international breakthrough, a lacerating chamber drama that uses the economic and aesthetic freedoms of digital video to achieve annihilating emotional intensity. On a wealthy man’s sixtieth birthday, a sprawling group of family and friends convenes at his country estate for a celebration that soon spirals into bedlam, as bombshell revelations threaten to tear away the veneer of bourgeois respectability and expose the traumas roiling beneath. The dynamic handheld camera work, grainy natural lighting, cacophonous diegetic sound, and raw performance style that would become Dogme hallmarks enhance the shattering visceral impact of this caustic indictment of patriarchal failings, which swings between blackest comedy and bleakest tragedy as it turns the sick soul of a family inside out.

Extras:
- 2K digital restoration, approved by director Thomas Vinterberg, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Audio commentary from 2005 featuring Vinterberg
- New interview with Vinterberg
- Two early short films by Vinterberg: Last Round (1993) and The Boy Who Walked Backwards (1995)
- The Purified, a 2002 documentary about Dogme 95, featuring interviews with Vinterberg and filmmakers Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring, and Lars von Trier
- Program in which Vinterberg discusses the real-life inspiration for the film
- Documentaries featuring members of the cast and crew at the film's premiere in Copenhagen and reflecting on the production
- ADM: DOP, a 2003 documentary profile of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle
- Deleted scenes, with optional audio commentary by Vinterberg
- Trailer




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