** Copresented by Goethe Pop Up Seattle and the Departments of Scandinavian Studies and German Studies at the University of Washington! This screening will feature remarks from Prof. Richard Block and Prof. Morten Bøje Stensgaard Larsen, as well as a live Q&A with the filmmaker. **

In the beginning, we see faces—real skin, real smiles, bright, uncertain eyes. Moving around a fluorescent-lighted room, they speak, trading lines from Sophocles’ Antigone, the ancient tragedy of a “frail girl emerging” who tiptoes through a no man’s land and dooms herself out of duty. We are there, in the terrible, electrifying intimacy of high school drama, in the Danish town of Nakskov, surrounded by industry, industrialized agriculture, and a working harbor. These high school students live in dorms and eat kebab, drink beer, and flirt while decoding what their lives will look like—and, just as important, learn from media and society what it is to be men and women. In this liminal place, a young woman with a mysterious smile, Sara (Annika Nuka Mathiassen), forms a fascination with unconventional drama teacher Karen (Sofia Nolso), and this fascination grows into something richer and stranger—a longing for connection, perhaps, or love.

Anything but a conventional coming-of-age story or queer romance, writer-director Anna Sofie Hartmann’s debut feature is more interested in imparting the experience of places, groups, and institutions—sights, sounds, haptics, the texture of life—than with genre tropes. Through careful, steady photographic composition and rich, sometimes strange soundscapes, we are drawn into the poetry of tumbling rocks at a construction site, the boiling of sugar at a factory, the slow passage of a tilled and dull land as seen from a moving train. The film’s aestheticization of the lives and events it depicts is immersive, not decorative. And when Limbo’s characters find and lose the way towards each other, themselves, and a meaningful future, the effect is all the more shocking for being so grounded in place. (Martin Schwartz)

(Anna Sofie Hartmann, Denmark & Germany, 2014, 80 min, in Danish with English subtitles)

“…another promising talent in the form of Denmark’s Anna Sofie Hartmann, whose Berlin film-school project Limbo transcends its blandly generic title and amply justifies its presence at a major European festival.” – Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter

“…[Q]uite an original film in the sense of both form and approach. A real low-key slow burner, it leaves the viewer with more of a profound than a strong, sudden impression, building up after the film, rather than during the viewing experience itself.” – Vladan Petkovic, Cineuropa