25/01/2024 - The Guilty director follows a prison officer facing the biggest dilemma of her life when a young man from her past is transferred to her workplace

Sidse Babett Knudsen in Sons (© Nikolaj Møller/Nordisk Film)

Gustav Möller’s latest effort, titled Sons, is set to world-premiere in the main competition of this year’s Berlinale, unspooling in the German capital from 15-25 February (see the news). His debut feature, The Guilty [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gustav Möller
film profile] (2018), was Denmark’s critically acclaimed Oscars hopeful and won the Audience Award for International Feature Film at Sundance.

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The new picture, penned by the helmer himself together with Emil Nygaard Albertsen, sees Eva, an idealistic prison officer, facing the biggest dilemma of her life when a young man from her past is transferred to the prison where she works. Without revealing her secret, Eva asks to be moved to the young man’s ward – the toughest and most violent in the prison. Here begins an unsettling psychological thriller, where Eva’s sense of justice puts both her morality and her future at stake.

The main cast is made up of Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sebastian Bull, Dar Salim, Olaf Johannesen and Marina Bouras. The technical crew includes DoP Jasper Spanning, editor Rasmus S Madsen, composer Jon Ekstrand, production designer Kristina Kovacs, make-up artist Vibe Knoblauch, and sound designers Oskar Skriver and Hans Christian Arnt Torp.

This year, Denmark is present at the Berlinale with Möller’s competition entry and Birgitte Stærmose’s Panorama-bound, Kosovo-set drama Afterwar [+see also:
film review
interview: Birgitte Stærmose
film profile] as well as two minority co-productions also playing in the Panorama strand – namely, Levan Akin’s opener Crossing [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Levan Akin
film profile] (co-produced with Sweden, France and Turkey) and Jiajie Lin’s Chinese-Danish picture Brief History of a Family [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], billed as a tale of “unspoken secrets, unfulfilled expectations and unresolved feelings”, and freshly screened at Sundance.

Sons was produced by Lina Flint for Denmark’s Nordisk Film and co-produced by the same firm’s Swedish division, with backing from the Danish Film Institute, the Swedish Film Institute and the Nordisk Film & TV Fond. It was made in collaboration with DR, SVT and Les Films du Losange. The production team is made up of executive producers Katrine Vogelsang, Henrik Zein and Calle Marthin as well as associate producer Thomas Heinesen, co-producer Eva Åkergren, post producer Signe Baasch and line producer Caroline Reichhardt.

Nordisk Film is also in charge of the picture’s domestic distribution, whilst France’s Les Films du Losange is selling it worldwide.