“We’ve Been Told A Completely Different Story About Danish History”: How Frederikke Aspöck & Anna Neye Crafted Göteborg Colonial Satire ‘Empire’
deadline.comSweden’s Göteborg Film Festival returned this month after two pandemic-disrupted editions with an accomplished crop of urgent and highly-political competition titles.
On opening night, there was Abbe Hassan’s Exodus, a tender thriller about the lives of refugees in Europe, while Malou Reymann’s Unruly, the eventual winner of the festival’s Dragon Award, uncovers the dark history of institutionalization and women’s rights in Denmark.
Out of the nine films in the main Nordic competition, six dealt directly or indirectly with issues around class, race, gender, and the role they play in a specifically Nordic construction of power; however, none more potent than Frederikke Aspöck’s scorching colonial satire Empire.
Set in 1848 on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, now part of the U.S. Virgin Islands but then a central post of the expanding Danish empire, the pic follows two close friends: Anna Heegaard and Petrine.
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