Ben Hamilton
July 24th, 2017

Share

This lot would make mincemeat out of Tarantino’s posse (photo: DFI)

Danish documentary ‘Team Hurricane’ has been shortlisted for the La Settimana Internazionale della Critica at the Venice Film Festival – an award for films by debutant directors.

Annika Berg’s film follows the summer adventures of eight teenage girls who the director found via social media and invited to attend a youth club.

The result is a coming-of-age tale that Berg contends is a “punk chick flick about radical girls in an ordinary world”, and co-producer, the Danish Film Institute, describes as “an experimental teen drama that celebrates teenage girls who dare to be loud, annoying, vulgar and vulnerable”.

Produced by Adomeit Film, ‘Team Hurricane’ faces competition from six other films for the award.

I ow’ a bit more than a handshake
The heart-warming ‘reunion’ of a Danish man with a woman whose bone marrow saved his life six years ago is rapidly gaining traction online. Jonas Staal, a close-to-death Copenhagener, received the news every leukaemia patient dreams of in 2011: a match had been found for him via  the National Marrow Program in the United States. Little did Rachel Kruse from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, know that she would be one of the very few (one of 540) called into action when she registered on the program in 2005. “It almost feels like you’re family even before you meet them – you feel like you have a long-lost relative,” she told kcci.com upon finally meeting Staal at Cedar Rapids Airport this month.

Polly put the cinnamon on
Rapidly going viral is a video of a group of young people in Odense marking a Danish tradition (see factbox) to congratulate unmarried men celebrating their 25th birthday by dousing them with cinnamon. In the video (see below), the man is wearing a dust mask and has his hands tied behind his back. Water is then poured over him to ensure the cinnamon will stick, which it duly does. But then seconds later, it ignites, quickly transforming the man into a human fireball, at which point several of his friends fling him to the ground. It is believed the fire was caused by a chemical reaction between two of the spice’s ingredients, cinnamaldehyde and eugenol. The man escaped serious injury. And yes, it probably smelt a little like Christmas.

The devil is here
It’s jul, sorry juli, and Satan, sorry Santa, is here to get us all in the Christmas mood. Starting today, the Santa Claus World Congress will this week bring yuletide cheer to the streets of Copenhagen and the famous nearby Bakken, the oldest themepark in the world. An estimated 150 Father Christmases are in attendance and today they marched down the capital’s main shopping street, Strøget.

Plenty of covers at this gig
YouTube star Leroy Sanchez is visiting Denmark for the first time as part of a world tour. His concert at Rust on October 26 will give some of his 3 million-plus subscribers a chance to see the cover song specialist in the flesh. Meanwhile, British rockers The Horrors have confirmed they will be performing at Lille Vega on November 27.