After the Wedding

Jacob is trying to keep an orphanage in India going and the money is nearly gone. A Danish company offers a large donation on one condition: he must come to Copenhagen and meet the chief executive. There he runs into Helene, the woman he was with twenty years ago and now the executive's wife. Then, at a wedding, he learns something else: Helene's daughter Anna is his child. The offer grows and he is asked to stay in Denmark. Susanne Bier directed from a screenplay by Anders Thomas Jensen. Mads Mikkelsen plays Jacob and Sidse Babett Knudsen plays Helene. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and lost to The Lives of Others. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 88 percent from 105 reviews and Metacritic at 78. Richard Schickel in Time put it among the ten best films of 2007 and found something deeply satisfying in the way it works out the fates of its troubled yet believable characters. Stine Fischer Christensen won Best Supporting Actress. The story was remade in the United States by Bart Freundlich in 2019. Who it is for: viewers who like Danish family drama and stories where one piece of information changes everything. Who it is not for: anyone uneasy with the bargain behind the generosity. The film presents philanthropy as a power relation from beginning to end.