The Celebration

The Celebration (1998) takes place at a Danish country house. The father is celebrating his sixtieth birthday; his children, relatives and friends arrive. At dinner the eldest son stands to make a toast and describes in it what his father did to him and his twin as children. Then the table goes back to eating. That is precisely where the horror is: nobody gets up, nobody calls the police, and dinner continues. This is the first film of the Dogme 95 movement, founded by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier to strip production values back and put plot and performance forward. The rules included a ban on adding sound in post production, and following them Vinterberg did not allow himself a director's credit; the movement forbade it. It was shot on consumer equipment: a Sony DCR-PC7 handycam using standard Mini DV cassettes. The budget stayed at around 1.3 million dollars. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998, shared with another film. It was Denmark's Oscar submission and did not make the final five. It runs 101 minutes. Good for: Dogme 95, family reckonings, and seeing what formal constraint does. Less good for: the subject is child abuse and the film addresses it directly. The image quality is deliberately poor, and the shaking camera and low resolution are unbearable for some viewers. There is a racist scene that the film leaves without comment.