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The Danish and American flags melt together on this tension-establishing poster for Christina Rosendahl's The Idealist
A radio journalist in Eastern Jutland, Denmark in 1988 latches himself onto a story, which will henceforth define his career: The crash of a US B52 airplane carrying four thermonuclear bombs in Greenland back in 1968, - at a time in which the enormous Northern territory was supposed to be free of nuclear weapons, and the secret aftermath of the affair, in which a large groups of Danes cleaned up the mess and got seriously ill.
The Idealist is written by Lars Kristian Andersen (Flame & Citron/Flammen & Citronen (2008)), Simon Pasternak (Sex, Drugs & Taxation/Spies & Glistrup (2013)), Birgitte Stærmose (Camino (2023)) and great Danish filmmaker, co-writer/director Christina Rosendahl (Supervoksen (2006)). It is based on the actual Thule base scandal.
Rosendahl and Co. have weaved together a surprisingly good and very debate-opening Cold War film here, a journalistic drama with grand political and principal perspectives more so than a thriller perhaps, but it is terrifically thrilling nonetheless, especially for Danes and Greenlanders. But really the conflict here with a giant allied super power in a bind in relation to basically a lilliput nation has much wider relevance, and the lies and weapons race during the Cold War has frightening perspectives and consequences the world over.
Peter Plaugborg (Ditte & Louise (2015-16)) is excellent as Brink, the energetic, idealistic and naive journalist protagonist; and so is Søren Malling (The Promised Land/Bastarden (2023)) as the leader of the clean-up workers, who collaborates with him. Smaller parts are also handled with the foremost professionalism of both Danes and Americans. The story is very large, and it goes around the Greenlanders' position in the matter. In the same way, it remains unclear how Brink in the first case gets onto the scandalous story. The Idealist is nevertheless impressively made and exceedingly well edited.
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Christina Rosendahl: 2020 in films - according to Film Excess
Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: 20.5 mil. DKK, approximately 2.88 mil. $
Box office: 372k $
= Box office disaster (returned 0.12 times its cost)
[The Idealist premiered 19 March (Nuuk, Greenland) and runs 114 minutes. The film disappointed at the Danish box office, selling only 39,661 tickets, coming to 372k $. The film was also released in Norway, Brazil and Argentina, likely with tiny results, as these are not reported at Box Office Mojo, where the Danish result figures. The film won 1/10 Robert award nominations, (Denmark's Oscar). Rosendahl returned with Vold i Kærlighedens Navn (2017, documentary) and theatrically with Vores Mand i Amerika (2020). Plaugborg and Malling both returned in The Shamer's Daughter/Skammerens Datter (2015). 1.6k+ IMDb users have given The Idealist a 6.9/10 average rating.]
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