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At the Torino Film Festival in Italy, Roger Garcia sits down with Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish auteur who first exploded
onto the international scene with his powerful "Mean Streets"-inflected film about Copenhagen's petty criminals
and drug dealers in PUSHER (1996). Since then, Refn has made two more PUSHER films, an American feature with John Turturro
(FEAR X), the Brechtian bio-pic of Britain's longest serving prisoner BRONSON, and the trippy Viking movie VALHALLA RISING
(2009) a far superior discourse and meditation on conquest, beliefs, and geography than Terence Malick's THE NEW WORLD. Refn
is one of the most exciting young filmmakers working in Europe today. And his new film is set in Bangkok! Join
Roger as he looks at Refn's career and films, and talks to the man himself.
NICOLAS WINDING REFN gets a grip on the world, ideas, violence and art in conversation
with Roger Garcia during the Torino Film Festival in Italy.
PUSHER 3 : I'M THE ANGEL OF DEATH Croatian Zlatko Buric plays Milo, the drug boss
in the best film of Winding's PUSHER series. Caught between catering his demanding daughter's wedding party (he also
runs a restaurant in downtown Copenhagen) and struggling with the consequences of a fake drug deal, Milo is definitely having
a bad day.
VALHALLA RISING The head-crunching and head-tripping tale of One Eye, a captive forced
to participate in the 10th century's version of Smackdown! joins a proseletizing crazy who tries to lead his band of Viking-types
to the Crusades in their long boat. Adrift in the fog, they go round in circles with unfortunate circumstances. With their
deranged religious views and complete ignorance of navigation, no wonder the Crusades were as much of a farce as a disaster!
Refn's film is one of the most extraordinary Danish films of recent times.
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