Sep 27 — IN A BETTER WORLD

This week, the Cape Breton premiere of WHEN YOU SLEEP, the latest short from New Waterford filmmakers Ashley McKenzie and Nelson MacDonald, plus our Academy Award winning main feature, IN A BETTER WORLD, by Danish director Susanne Bier.

From the Toronto Star:

Split between peaceful Denmark and battle-scarred Kenya, IN A BETTER WORLD plays almost as biblical proverb, as two humanist fathers struggle to teach their own challenged morality to their troubled sons.

Anton (Sweden’s Mikael Persbrandt) is a doctor who heroically and unselfishly donates his medical skills to assisting Kenyan women who have been brutalized by a vicious warlord. The extensive time Anton spends abroad has frayed relations back home in Denmark. He’s estranged from his wife (Trine Dyrholm) and unable to be a proper father to his sensitive teen son Elias (Markus Rygaard), who is being bullied at school.

Businessman Claus (Ulrich Thomsen) has his own family issues. Despite the recent death of his wife, work obliges him to continue making frequent trips abroad, hurting his relationship with his sullen son Christian (William Johnk Nielsen), who is close to Elias’s age. The family has recently relocated from London back to Denmark, but father-son relations remain fragile.

Christian and Elias bond over their mutual antipathy towards the school bully. Elias is inclined to just suffer the beatings, but Christian most definitely isn’t. He returns violence with a shocking escalation, getting himself and Elias into serious trouble at both school and home.

• Read the reviews
• Check IMDb’s complete credits
• Visit the movie’s official site.

IN A BETTER WORLD plays one show only, 7 p.m., Thursday, September 27, at the Empire Theatres Studio 10, 325 Prince St., Sydney. Tickets: $11; Students $7. A seasons pass for the remaining 9 fall movies costs $75. All prices include HST.