JAGTEN

Jagten ("the Hunt") is the film currently being shown at the local cinema. It's been a great critical success, with Mads Mikkelsen winning the best actor award at last year's Cannes festival. It's a very good film.

Mikkelsen plays Lukas, a divorced teacher in a small rural community, who gets assigned to help out in the kindergarten when the local secondary school closes. All the children love Lukas, who is the only male amongst the staff, and who engages in a lot of physical rough and tumble with them. One of the children, Clara, is the daughter of Lukas' best friend, and has a crush on him. When he gently rebuffs the heart she has made for him as a Christmas present, she tells the kindergarten leader that Lukas has exposed himself to her. The leader's repressed fantasies run wild, and soon Lukas is being accused of all sorts of indecencies against children, despite his having recently embarked on an affair with the kindergarten's Eastern European cleaner. In succession, he loses his job, is arrested by the police, and is shunned by the community.

Jagten refers to the deer hunts, which Lukas has done with his friends from the village since he was a boy. But it also refers to the witchhunt against him that becomes increasingly irrational and violent. With one exception, his hunting friends all disown him, he gets beaten up in the supermarket, his dog is killed. Even when the police case against him collapses - the children have all sworn to terrible things taking place in the cellar of his house, which doesn't have one - people are unwilling to believe his innocence. Only when Clara finally admits that she has made the whole thing up does it stop. Though the ending leaves that statement somewhat in doubt; do such things ever stop?

Not only is Jagten a very good film, but it is bringing in the punters. There were 75 paying customers in the cinema on a very cold Thursday evening. It bodes well for our refurbishment project later in the year.

Walter Blotscher