Description

Inside of every actor, there is a director just dying to emerge, or so the theory goes, and that certainly seems to be the case for Danish character actor Nicholas Bro. If you’re at all familiar with current Danish film, you’ll have seen Bro on screen quite a lot even if you don’t know him by name, but Bro has loftier goals than being simply one of Denmark’s most in-demand on-screen players. He wants to make a film, to tell a story. A love story. The greatest love story ever. His love story. And so Bro borrows a camera from his friend, acclaimed director Christoffer Boe, and sets off to capture the love he shares with his young wife. Only problem is that she’s fallen out of love with him and Bro is too self-absorbed to notice until she leaves him –- and Denmark –- entirely. But he has grown attached to the camera now, perhaps more than he ever was to his wife, and so Bro simply continues filming, capturing his own slow disintegration and slide into violence.

Off Screen blurs the line between truth and fiction like few films ever to come before. Ostensibly assembled after the fact by Boe from footage shot by Bro, the film actually was entirely shot by the well-known actor himself, in his own home, with his actual friends and family as perhaps unwitting participants. What’s scripted? What’s real? Is there any way of ever being able to tell? Off Screen is both a powerful piece of character work, easily the high point of Bro’s career to date, and an unflinching, wryly funny dissection of celebrity culture, rampant ego, the increasing pervasiveness of the media and the easy slide from idealism to voyeurism to obsession to destruction.

—Todd Brown

"Where the film stops being a documentary and strays into fiction is never clear" - Boyd van Hoej, EUROPEAN-FILMS.NET

"Scruffy, ultra-realist..." Leslie Felperin, VARIETY

Website

http://offscreen.dk/

Credits

Director: Christoffer Boe
Screenplay: Christoffer Boe, Knud Romer Jørgensen
Cast: Nicolas Bro Lene Maria Christensen Karen Margrethe Bjerre Christoffer Boe
Producers: Tine Grew Pfeiffer
Distributor: Danish Film Institute

Screens with...

Doses of Roger Canadian Premiere Usa 2005 | 13 min English language