The Art of Crying

Life is not easy for eleven-year-old Allan in South Jutland in the early seventies. His father's mental health is broken and he often threatens to kill himself; his mother gave up long ago. Holding the family together has fallen to Allan. To keep his father upright the boy starts doing increasingly terrible things, and believes he is doing them out of love. Peter Schønau Fog's film is adapted from Erling Jepsen's novel. Everything is given through Allan's eyes; the child does not know how grave what he is describing is, the audience does, and the distance comes from there. The film does not put the abuse on screen, it shows the consequences. The tone slips into black comedy at times, and that is the only thing making the unbearable carryable.