The Broken Circle Breakdown

Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown and Alex van Warmerdam’s feature Borgman, a co-production with Flanders through Epidemic, are selected to compete in the official competition of this year’s Sydney Film Festival (5-16 June). The Sydney fest is one of the world’s longest-running festivals, its official competition presenting the Sydney Film Prize and $60,000 in cash.

After taking the Berlinale by storm, The Broken Circle Breakdown went on to conquer other parts of Europe. Now, also Australia has fallen for the intense drama.

When everything comes together there’s nothing to beat being a film producer. ‘Finding an audience with a good film is amazing,’ says Dirk Impens of Menuet. It’s a big kick. It’s orgasmic.’ Impens felt the love early on in his career with Daens, which was nominated for an Oscar, and more recently with Felix Van Groeningen’s The Misfortunates, which was a huge success at home and in festivals abroad. Van Groeningen’s latest, The Broken Circle Breakdown, rolls out internationally at the Berlinale.

However, Impens wasn't so sure it would happen with van Groeningen's most recent movie. Where The Misfortunates attracted a young audience with its mix of comic bad behaviour and deep emotion, The Broken Circle Breakdown is about a more sobering subject: a couple driven apart when their small daughter develops a terminal illness.

After the success of The Misfortunates at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 director Felix van Groeningen had plenty of offers. ‘A lot of scripts came in, but I stopped reading them because it made me very sad,’ he says. ‘It’s not my style, I can’t decide to make a movie like that. If I want to make something it has to start from inside.'

The kind of deep, emotional reaction he is talking about happened when he saw The Broken Circle Breakdown featuring the cover-ups of Alabama'. This musical stage play tells the story of Elise and Didier, two completely different people who are right for one another. She runs a tattoo parlour and he plays banjo in a bluegrass band. They fall in love, perform together and have a daughter, Maybelle. but when the little girl dies of cancer, they lose one another as well.

The Broken Circle Breakdown has won the Audience Award at the fourth edition of CPH PIX in Copenhagen (11-24 April). Felix Van Groeningen’s feature film scooped one of the mere two awards that are granted each year, the Politiken Audience Award and the New Talent Grand Prix that awards first feature films of promising directors. CPH PIX, together with its partner festival focusing on documentaries CPH:DOX, is one of the most renowned Scandinavian film fests.

In co-operation with the Danish newspaper Politiken, CPH PIX annually presents one film with the Politiken Audience Award. The festival audience choses the winner out of a pool of 10 contestants pre-selected from the CPH PIX programme, all of them having the potential to be distributed to Danish cinemas. Next to The Broken Circle Breakdown Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children, a co-production with Flanders via Prime Time, was also nominated.

This year’s fifth edition of Copenhagen’s CPH PIX Film Festival (11-24 April) presents three (co-)productions from Flanders. Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown and Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children are screening in the Politiken’s Audience Award spectrum, while Comrade Kim goes Flying, a co-production by Anja Daelemans, is selected for an Open Air film screening.

An intense drama, van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown is screening in the fest’s Politiken’s Audience Award section, which assembles a selection of 10 films which could fare well in Danish cinema distribution and also harbours Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children. The winning film is rewarded with support to be launched in Danish cinemas and will also be shown on Danish television.