Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen, who rose to international fame with the television series Borgen, stars in the prison thriller Vogter, one of the twenty films in competition this year at the Berlinale, the Berlin film festival.
Directed by the Swede Gustav Möller, this co-production between Denmark and Sweden, released last night, tells of the power relationship that is established between Eva, the prison officer played by Knudsen, and the young Mikkel, a new and dangerous inmate played by Sebastian Bull. The newcomer is related to Eva’s past, but only at the end do we discover what violent event linked them then.
“The film contains a great contradiction, and that is that in our part of the world we want prisons to be places of rehabilitation, forgiveness and second chances, but also places of punishment and destruction,” Möller argued at a press conference with some actors in the cast.
Eva is an idealistic prison guard, who aspires to make prisoners redeem themselves for their crimes, but the appearance of Mikkel prompts her to request to be transferred to work in the violent prisoners’ module and leads her to a dilemma. The power exercised by the guard with respect to the prisoner varies, “in the first part it is a literal power and in the second the emotional power appears that leads us to a more surreal way of telling the story,” said the director. This is seen when Mikkel convinces Eva to take him to her mother’s house.
Gustav Möller – who became known in 2018 with the police drama The Guilty – co-wrote this script with Emil Nygaard Albertsen with Sidse Babett Knudsen in mind as the lead actress. “Eva is a very dense and nuanced character, and the prison with the hallways becomes a metaphor for her mental space and her psychological journey; “As this is not a film rich in words, the physical acting has been very important,” said Knudsen. The team visited prisons in Europe in search of a location, and finally selected a Copenhagen prison for principal photography.