MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Among those up for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Academy Awards is "The Hunt." It's the latest from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg who made his reputation with "The Celebration" in 1998, a dark story about accusations of sexual abuse. It won international acclaim and the Jury Prize at Cannes. It's a subject Vinterberg picks up again in "The Hunt."
The film stars Mads Mikkelsen, best known for villainous roles in "Casino Royale" and the NBC series, "Hannibal." Pat Dowell has more.
PAT DOWELL, BYLINE: Director Thomas Vinterberg was a co-founder of the brief but influential Danish movement called Dogme 95, which mandated that films be made with more humility and less Hollywood artificiality.
THOMAS VINTERBERG: Dogme taught me that there has to be a reason to put up a lamp and put on makeup and add music. You're not just making movies.
DOWELL: He made the movement's first film "The Celebration" which brought him worldwide acclaim and, he says, led to a strange encounter and eventually to "The Hunt."
VINTERBERG: Someone knocked on my door on a winter night all the way back in, I think, year 2000, a very famous children's psychiatrist. And he said, you did a film some years ago called "Festen," or "The Celebration," I think he called over there. And I said, Yes? And he said, well, then there's another film you have to do as well.
DOWELL: The doctor gave him some papers, but Vinterberg didn't get around to reading them until several years later. When he did, he discovered frightening stories of false accusations of child molestation. He knows there are plenty of real cases. "The Celebration" was a story in which a man accuses his father of rape and fights to be believed.
"The Hunt" details the opposite problem. The film paints a portrait of a tight knit Danish hunting community...
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DOWELL: ...where lifelong friendships shatter over a misunderstood comment repeated by a kindergartner. The focus is on the people, not the police investigation, says Vinterberg.
VINTERBERG: Our goal was to make a film about very strong bonds between people, about love, about camaraderie in its best sense and about how vulnerable that can be, a film about the thought as a virus, so to speak. With one click or one wrong statement on Facebook, then your life can be changed or ruined. I thought that needed further exploration and I was curious about all that.
Having said that, I really find it important to say that, for me, it's also a story of love. It's about how much conflict people can actually survive.
DOWELL: The teacher who is the focus of the conflict is played by Mads Mikkelsen, Denmark's biggest international star and winner of the Best Actor Award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival for his performance. He says he was drawn to the script for the way it expresses all points of view.
MADS MIKKELSEN: One of the most beautiful things about this script is that it's hard to point a finger at anyone. When I see it, and when I read it, I understand my friend, and I understand the woman who works in the kindergarten. I understand the little girl, I understand my friend's wife. So for that reason alone, it's very difficult to put your anger anywhere.
And that is obviously the dilemma of the story. There are no bad guys. There's just an enormous love that's being turned into enormous fear and eventually into hate. And I think that is the real power and the real story of the film.
DOWELL: Mikkelsen's ostracized character defiantly goes to Christmas Eve church services and breaks down.
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MIKKELSEN: He's going to church because he has a right to do it. It is also his city, it's his town. So he's standing up for himself there. And then I think that the character is getting slightly more surprised with what happens to himself in the church. And so he's taken aback with his own reaction, I guess. He's getting quite emotional. And then he steps up and makes a situation out of it.
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DOWELL: "The Hunt" is part of a distinguished history of filmmaking in Denmark, one that's more than a century long. Vinterberg says it's also part of a literary tradition of what he calls "dark tales of the north. The director says "The Hunt" takes inspiration from one of the most celebrated Danish storytellers.
VINTERBERG: I see this tale a little bit like a Hans Christian Andersen tale. There's a group of very innocent, naive even, people jumping into a lake, naked, pure. And then this glass splinter comes into the society and darkness spreads.
DOWELL: But splinters can be removed, and "The Hunt" seems to have done that for Thomas Vinterberg. He's made films steadily since 1998 and "The Celebration," but none as admired or popular as his latest. For NPR News, this is Pat Dowell.
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.