The Danish Poet

Let's begin the last part of our summer course with something very interesting. The Danish Poet is an awarded short animated film in 2006, it even won the Oscar in that category, so, it´s really good, you'll see.

Here's what you are going to do:

1. Watch the film (it takes aproximately 15 minutes)

2. Answer these questions on the blog:
A. Discuss the subtle techniques used in the film. Which elements had an emotional impact? (The
delicate music and the lilting accent of the narrator, for example, give the film a kind of Sweetness and sense of pending romance.)
How did the filmmaker, Torill Kove, prevent the story from being too sweet? (She adds regular dashes of wickedly funny detail, e.g., the perilously sliding bovine, the madly growing hair, the dog that gets kicked regularly, the eventual love affair between that dog and the neighbor dog, etc.)
B. Talk about the elements of truth in the film: summers in Norway are notoriously rainy; many
Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are somewhat confused about their national beginnings; Sigrid
Undset was a writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Do you believe that Undset was really a distant relative of the filmmaker? Or is this a device
to tell a wonderful story? Does it matter? This should lead to a discussion about poetic license
and fact vs. fiction, when writers and filmmakers create an entertaining story based on real events and people.
C. Did you like it? why?

3. Write your own story. (in the another entry)