Carsten Brandt

A drama about a group of women preparing to give birth who meet and bond at the hospital. Based on the best-selling Danish novel by Dea Trie Moerch and directed by acclaimed Danish filmmaker Astrid Henning-Jensen, "Winterborn" was considered one of the best movies of the decade in Denmark.

Max (Søltoft) is a popular teacher at a public school who needs a new schoolmaster. In an effort to entice him to take the vacated position, the boys hire a stripper to seduce the sexually inexperienced scholar. The wife and daughter of the former headmaster also wish to tutor the teacher in their own private lessons in human sexuality.

Catherine and Frank are arguing and their neighbors Thomas and Jenna are drawn into the fight.

Catherine and Frank are arguing and their neighbors Thomas and Jenna are drawn into the fight.

One can't help wondering whether, some quarter-century ago, Carsten Brandt had the slightest inkling of the epic dimension the project he was then starting to conceive – The Gentle Pain – would take on in the subsequent decades. For it became epic in just about every sense of the word: the film is very long; it tells a multi-layered story characterised as much by its digressions as by its main narrative thread, which concerns a filmmaker’s attempts to make sense of the life of Thorkild Hansen, a Danish traveller/historian/writer internationally probably best known for his non-fiction novel Processen mod Hamsun (1978); and it took a long time to finish – and then sat on a shelf due to legal battles galore. What is now finally revealed is a monument of modern(ist) cinema: a work that as much charts one man’s journey into his soul as a voyage of discovery into another artist’s mind.

One can't help wondering whether, some quarter-century ago, Carsten Brandt had the slightest inkling of the epic dimension the project he was then starting to conceive – The Gentle Pain – would take on in the subsequent decades. For it became epic in just about every sense of the word: the film is very long; it tells a multi-layered story characterised as much by its digressions as by its main narrative thread, which concerns a filmmaker’s attempts to make sense of the life of Thorkild Hansen, a Danish traveller/historian/writer internationally probably best known for his non-fiction novel Processen mod Hamsun (1978); and it took a long time to finish – and then sat on a shelf due to legal battles galore. What is now finally revealed is a monument of modern(ist) cinema: a work that as much charts one man’s journey into his soul as a voyage of discovery into another artist’s mind.