The Celebration

Our Premium Pick series affords VIFF+ Premium members the opportunity to share a movie of their choice with their friends and our audience. This month the film has been selected by Edward Pascal — it’s one of the key films of the late 90s, the most influential and acclaimed of the Danish Dogme 95 movement.

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 diagetic 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.

Ed has this to say about his pick: “After many years of attending VIFF, this film really sticks with me. It is a film of family dynamics and disfunction and dark secrets done with black humor that is riveting.”

A virtuoso feat… excitingly inventive and pure. Vinterberg hurtles the film forward in a manner that feels seamless but calls for immense skill. A party to remember.

Janet Maslin, New York Times