NEWS

Saturday night the Mexican director Amat Escalante won the Silver Lion for his new film "The Untamed" (original title: La Región Salvaje) at Venice Film Festival. The fund is proud to have contributed to the making of this thrilling piece of combined fantasy and social realism.

"The Untamed" is a Mexican, Danish, French, Norwegian, German co-production. Copenhagen Film Fund’s investment of 100.000 euro last year secured Danish creative labour on the film, why producer, photographer and editor is mostly Danish. The film makes great use of visual effects, which are also made by a Danish team consisting of visual effect artist Peter Hjort and the companies Ghost VFX, The Gentlemen Broncos and SODA.

Read more about the film here.

A Danish creature
One of the central characters in the film is what the magazine Variety describes as “a writhing, amorphous, many-tentacled creature, sequestered in a dark chamber, that becomes an unlikely instrument of sexual agency and self-realization to those who submit to it.”

This creature is Danish so to speak. It is made by visual- and make-up effects companies in Copenhagen supervised by Peter Hjort – who also was responsible for all visual effects on Lars von Triers last three films "Antichrist", "Melancholia" and "Nymphomaniac".

”I have worked on a lot of international films with expensive effects and some of the best talent in Germany, France and Poland. But I have never before had the chance to work with the best talent in Denmark, which is a fun and great experience for me made possible by the establishment of Copenhagen Film Fund,” Peter Hjort tells on the day of the Untamed premiere in Venice.

He describes Amat Escalante as a true artistic auteur, whom the Danish photographer Manuel Alberto Claro and himself have played creative ball with throughout the development of the film. Peter has been creative supervisor from the beginning for the sake of having a common concept and visual expression in the film.

The film has also been selected for Toronto International Film Festival where it had its North American premiere Monday the 9^th of September and for San Sebastian Film Festival 19^th – 24^th of September.

Read Screen Daily’s review of the film here and get a visual sneak peak below.

Synopsis

Young mother Alejandra is a working housewife, raising two boys with husband Angel in a small city. Her brother Fabian works as a nurse in a local hospital. Their provincial lives are upset with the arrival of mysterious Veronica. Sex and love can be fragile in certain regions where strong family values, hypocrisy, homophobia, and male chauvinism exist. Veronica convinces them that in the nearby woods, inside an isolated cabin, dwells something not of this world that could be the answer to all of their problems – something whose force they cannot resist and with whom they must make peace or suffer its wrath.