Danish director Henning Carlsen to be honored in Copenhagen

At the Gala Award Show on September 30th which wraps the Copenhagen International Film Festival 2006, acclaimed Danish director Henning Carlsen will receive the Golden Swan Lifetime Achievement.

‘Henning Carlsen has been a role model for filmmakers in generations. And he has given the audiences unforgettable moments in the darkness of the cinema’ says festival director Janne Giese.

Henning Carlsen can be compared to a lighthouse in the Danish film landscape. Though the year on his birth certificate says 1927, he is still active in filmmaking. Right now he is working together with producer Nina Crone and the legendary script writer Jean-Claude Carrière on an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. With his entrepreneurial drive and inventiveness, he has left significant marks both at home and abroad.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Henning Carlsen’s classic Hunger (Sult), and the festival is paying a tribute to Carlsen for his masterpiece by showing the film on the big screen.

Hunger (Sult) is the film that is mentioned most in connection with Henning Carlsen’s remarkable career in Danish cinema. The film is based on a novel by Knut Hamsun and has been called the best adaptation ever by American author Paul Auster. It was highly acclaimed already in 1966, when Hunger (Sult) was selected for the main competition in Cannes - though it had to content itself with ‘only’ getting the Best Actor award. This trophy was awarded to Per Oscarson for his outstanding performance as a starved writer, who in a feverish, hunger-induced delirium wanders the streets of Christiania (later Oslo). The film was also highly praised in the legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma with the words ‘a great film is born right before our eyes’.