Niels Arden Oplev at the Berlinale. Photo portraits by Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net. All rights reserved.

Winner of the Glass Bear at the recent Kinderfilmfest of the Berlinale, Drømmen (We Shall Overcome) from Danish film- and television director Niels Arden Oplev (1996’s Portland) is a deliciously old-fashioned cute kid versus adult tyrant story, which is for once is not the fruit of a screenwriter who has seen too many other (and often better) films but a writer-director who sat down to fashion a film closely related to his own experiences. The editor of europeanfilms.net, Boyd van Hoeij, met with the director in Berlin. 

Drømmen is set in 1969 – when the director himself was an 8-year-old – and follows the trials of the young Frits (Janus Dissing Rathke), who suffers under the tyrannical headmaster Mr Lundum-Svenson at the same school where his mother works as a nurse. Frits will fall victim to Lundum-Svenson’s violence and will find the courage to face and fight it from an unlikely source – the recently murdered Martin Luther King whom he has seen and heard preaching on television.

The influence of this American activist on a small boy in the Danish countryside effectively blends American and Danish influences and juxtaposes it with the universal struggle for a dignified acceptance of each person’s worth. Oplev – who has lived in New York, is married to an American and has two children with dual citizenship – has been accused of being “too American”, especially for his Emmy-winning work on two local police TV-series. Says the director: “People in Denmark accuse me of being American when really what I wanted to do with these two series was make them entertaining rather than depressive-realistic, like DOGME or something along those lines. Even in Drømmen, there is definitely something of an American way in which the story is told, even though it is extremely Danish and extremely local.”

Of course there are differences between European and American productions, and one conspicuous one is budget: “European films never have gigantic budgets, so you have to express yourself in another way. You never have the budgets that are typically associated with Hollywood productions, so you are forced to concentrate more on the story [and] the characters. So European film definitely has that smallness and at the same time it is very close to people’s real life, closer, in any case than American or Asian cinema. Drømmen definitely has its place in European cinema because it proves you can make a historical film in a modern way – because I don’t think the film comes off as altmodisch – I shot it like you shoot a film today. And I think [the public screenings] prove that these clichés of a boy as the protagonist and the historical and countryside setting can be used in a way that satisfies the audience of today and that, I think, is very European.”

With Drømmen Oplev has certainly made his most crowd-pleasing film to date. On what sort of films he likes himself, he says: “I really like American films and entertaining European films. I like films that try to seduce me, films that take me to places where I did not think it was going to go. I want films to entertain me even as they give me a glimpse into someone’s soul that I never thought I would see. For me, you can combine the two. I don’t seem myself as a particularly Danish filmmaker, and I could have made this film function in England if I wanted to, or France or anywhere else where they had bastard schools. Me personally, I feel very European, I have always been for a united Europe and am not so much interested in countries as I am in local places. I think that Drømmen does focus on the local, the particular so that the story can become universal and that was one of the ambitions when writing the film.”

The film is inspired by events from the director’s own life as a young child: “The first seed of the idea happened a long time ago, because I was one of those children standing in that schoolyard cheering, as the kids do in the end of the film. A friend of mine got his ear ripped off by that headmaster that is portrayed in the film. So this film is extremely personal: the father is based on my own father and the mother definitely has characteristics of my own mother. A lot people in the film are either family or friends from that time, who have influenced that universe. My first film, Portland, was extremely dark and my second film was a quite crude and tough black comedy and then I made these television series that are quite mainstream in between so it was quite a decision for me to say, now I am going back to writing something that I know and care about. Now I am grown-up enough to dare to make something that is really emotional. I always knew when I started to write – which is 23 years ago now – that the story was there. Maybe not in this form, but when you have experienced something that strong [you do not forget it]. We were scared shit when we went to school, so when we were finally liberated from him, that was an enormous thing, so the seed [of the story] I carried it with me for a long time.”

The film has a very strong visual palette, with the summer in the countryside literally bursting from the screen with an intensity that has not been seen since Salvatores’ story of a child in the countryside that was Io non ho paura (I’m not scared). This was not a specific reference, however: “Visually, we did not really have any [specific] reference materials, though in the way that the drama unfolds and what kind of film it was going to be Billy Elliot was an inspiration and an old Swedish film, Mit liv som hund (My life as a dog) was an inspiration funny enough, but that was more like the mood rather than the themes. I knew I had a tough subject and I wanted that to be balanced by a warmth of mood. The family could argue, but they argue because of outside pressure and because they really love each other. I always try to root the visuals in the story. The story has a toughness and I wanted the visuals to be beautiful, and I wanted it to be summer so bad that you kind of long for that time when you were thirteen years old and you held this girl’s hand for the first time and you become totally nostalgic. This story could have been set in the fall, with the fog go over the fields that were brown and ploughed and it could be godawfully depressing all the way through. Maybe it would have been artier but I do not think we would have gotten the emotions out of it that we do now. That contrast really helps.”

Like the aforementioned Salvatores film and the recent French hit Les choristes (The chorus), Drømmen is a film about children that is not necessarily only for children. Says the director: “The question whether this is a children’s film or a film for grown-ups has followed this production since day one. When I went to the film consultant of the Danish Film Institute, I had to choose whether I went to the one for children’s films or the one dealing with grown-up fare. I went to the latter, and she asked me: “Is this not a children’s film?” I think that the film has quite a grown-up perspective, but I will not deny that the film can very well be watched by somewhat older children. Excuse me for bragging, but this is a high-quality family film and a lot of times films aimed at the entire family are just silly; I feel this film could be enjoyed as much by someone who is 90 as by someone who is nine. That is why I like to compare it to Billy Elliot and Pele erobreren (Pele the Conqueror), because these were the type of films that had a strong cross-over between grown-ups and children. I think that mothers and fathers could now take their nine-year-olds and up and show them “this is what it was like and what we fought for and this is how much things have changed”.

“It has been amazing to see how the film connects with the young audience; how they connect to the toughness and also to the fight for justice. This is of course a universal theme and even though you are not allowed to beat them up anymore, it is certainly possible to intimidate them in a lot of other ways. During one of the test screenings, there was a 16-year-old girl who wrote on her sheet: “Thank you for this film, because we had terrible trouble with our headmaster”. Someone who is 16 years old, in our age! In any case, how do you define when a child has ‘grown up’? There are things that ten year olds says that sometimes make a hell of a lot more sense than what ‘grown up’ people say. Who knows, if we followed the judgement of these kids a little more often in this godforsaken world that we are trying so hard to destroy, it might look a little bit different.”