DAY SEVEN November 9, 2005

by Peter Martin

Set in a remote village, NOI ALBINOI followed the adventures of its teenage protagonist as he came to grips with the collision of adult expectations and adolescent yearnings. With its likable characters and a deeply touching story, Kari's first film struck a chord with viewers--including those who saw it at AFI FEST 2003. But the production--filmed on location during a freezing cold winter--was strenuous and exhausting, and Kari was ready for something different. "This time I wanted to do a quick movie," he recalls, "a movie that embraces the joy of storytelling. So I started like that--with nothing but a wish to work in a certain spirit. This spirit I associate very much with European filmmaking in the 1960s--that raw, careless feel, which is full of style at the same time. I wanted my film to be a tribute to that era."

Kari's protagonist in his new film, DARK HORSE, is a young man who, in the director's words, "operates on a different frequency than the rest of society." Guerilla street artist Daniel (Jakob Cedergren) anonymously spray paints walls with extravagant declarations of love for the benefit of his friends. He's content with his non-existent income, and why not? His poverty doesn't keep him from quickly capturing the heart of bakery shop worker Franc (Tilly Scott Pedersen), even though she is the unrequited love of his best friend, Grandpa (Nicolas Bro).

While set abroad, the aimlessness of Daniel and his friends may be reminiscent of a certain American television series, and that's no accident. "My inspiration for this film was definitely SEINFELD," the director surprisingly reveals. "I had never seen an episode before starting on this film, but my co-writer, Rune Schjott, introduced me to this fantastic world and that was probably the biggest inspiration in terms of humor and dialogue. We gave ourselves the task to make an artsy-fartsy movie that starts like an episode of SEINFELD but ends like a (Krzysztof) Kieslowski film."

With its black-and-white imagery and loose, jazzy feel, DARK HORSE is also clearly inspired by the French New Wave. Kari much prefers Francois Truffaut to Jean-Luc Godard; still, one of his favorite films is Godard's MASCULINE FEMININE. "I always use that film as a starting point, but end up doing something totally different. This time I wanted to be true to the source. I shamelessly copied the spirit of that film--and even one scene in particular, which did not end up in the finished film but will appear as extra material on the eventual DVD release."

In a final, ironic twist for someone who wanted a less strenuous production experience, filming in a big city proved to be a nightmare. "I have a rock 'n' roll attitude when it comes to shooting," Kari says. "I hate everything that needs applications, permissions and control. And Copenhagen is only that."

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