movies: Before It Ends

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title	country	year	length	director	url	blurb	virtual_screening	programmer_blurb	trailer_url	language
Before It Ends	Denmark	2023	90	Anders Walter	https://www.siff.net/festival/before-it-ends	Oscar®-winning director Anders Walter (Helium) highlights a sensitive chapter in Denmark’s history near the end of World War II about a headmaster torn between helping the stranded refugees assigned to his boarding school or adhering to his city’s anti-German sentiment.	1	The fragility of morality lies at the heart of Anders Walter's Before It Ends. Following Jakob, a headmaster at a boys boarding school in Ryslinge, Denmark in April 1945, the imminent Nazi occupation finally rears its ugly, fascistic head one day and Jakob is forcibly dictated to convert the school he pridefully leads into a shelter for German refugees. Jakob, his family, and close associates are thrust into roles well beyond their asking, and when a brutal wave of diphtheria plagues the unwelcome visitors, an impulsive act of humanity by Jakob ultimately leads to the swift unfurling of the town's populace, pitting once-peaceful neighbors against one another in a battle of muddied motives. Walter's diffused direction does plenty in obfuscating where exactly the “right” and “wrong” lie, and the lack of moral clarity Walter presents may further frustrate in a world currently pained by both bloodsheds in Gaza and Ukraine. But with the film’s setting in history as an example, freedom from conflict can always be around the corner, in spite of current bleakness. If anything, the film is a harsh reminder of the work that must still be done in preventing wide-scale atrocities from occurring again in the future. Walter's cryptic messaging perhaps asks of us not to raise our pitchforks at those we're closest to first, but instead to read beyond the room and reorient our collective energy to those who really pull us apart.—Dannzel Escobar	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGZxwQfKUIk	Danish