10 Things I Learned: The Celebration

Production Notes—

Jan 28, 2022

1.

In 1995, director Lars von Trier contacted Thomas Vinterberg, whom he considered the most promising young Danish filmmaker. (Vinterberg had then not yet made his first feature film, The Biggest Heroes, but had directed two well-regarded shorts, Last Round and The Boy Who Walked Backwards.) Von Trier invited him to be not only a member of Dogme 95—a movement that sought to generate a new level of focus on storytelling and performance, as a direct counter to big-budget films’ perceived overreliance on special effects and other digital tools—but also the cowriter of its manifesto. According to Vinterberg, it took half an hour for von Trier and him to come up with the ten governing rules.

2.

In addition to founders von Trier and Vinterberg, the group’s main members also included Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen. This core is often referred to as the Dogme “brethren,” but the movement was not merely a boys’ club. Four out of the ten Danish Dogme films were directed by women: Italian for Beginners (2000, by Lone Scherfig), which went on to become one of the most profitable Scandinavian films of all time; Open Hearts (2002, by Susanne Bier); Old, New, Borrowed and Blue (2003, by Natasha Arthy); and In Your Hands (2004, by Annette K. Olesen).

Lone Scherfig, Susanne Bier, Natasha Arthy, and Annette K. Olesen

3.

Though the movement was established in 1995, it wasn’t until a few years later that Vinterberg completed the first Dogme film with The Celebration (Festen). The director devoted much of that time to finding a story that he felt could be developed within the Dogme limitations.

4.

Vinterberg drew inspiration for the film from a 1996 Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) broadcast detailing a speech given by a caller pseudonymously named Allan at his stepfather’s sixtieth birthday party. In 2002, DR located Allan, who met with Vinterberg. He revealed that he had invented the story, but that he had based it on the true-life experience of a nurse he had met.

5.

As outlined in the manifesto, Dogme 95 films must be shot using only a handheld camera. The Celebration’s cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle—who studied alongside Vinterberg at film school and shot many of the movement’s early films, including Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy and Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune—performed a number of camera tests for the movie, eventually settling on the smallest digital video camera available at the time, a Sony PC7, which fits in the palm of a hand. This gave a new level of flexibility to the filmmakers while also fitting with Dogme’s disregard of aesthetic matters.

Buy Now

6.

The tenth rule of the Dogme manifesto states that the “director must not be credited.” However, since Vinterberg makes a cameo appearance in a brief scene as a taxi driver dropping off the character Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah) at the party, his name technically does appear in the film’s end credits.

7.

Vinterberg typically writes his characters with specific actors in mind. In the case of The Celebration, most of the principal cast members were also in his previous feature, The Biggest Heroes—the main exception being Henning Moritzen, the well-known Danish stage and screen actor who had starred in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.

Trine Dyrholm and Thomas Bo Larsen, who star in *The Celebration*

8.

The Celebration and von Trier’s The Idiots, the second Dogme movie, were both finished in 1998 and selected for the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The Celebration won the Jury Prize there, among many other awards.

Vinterberg (center) and the cast of *The Celebration* at Cannes

9.

The Celebration also became a successful stage play. The adaptation was written by English playwright David Eldridge and has been performed all around the world.

10.

Despite the success of The Celebration, none of Vinterberg’s nine subsequent films to date were made under the Dogme umbrella, just as he intended. “The whole idea was to create renewal,” he has said. “Repeating it would be boring.”