The Kingdom I

See all three installments of The Kingdom and save: $30 (General Public) / $25 (FLC Members). Discount automatically applied at checkout.

The Kingdom I – Dec. 16-22
The Kingdom II – Dec. 23-27
The Kingdom Exodus – Dec. 28-Jan. 2

Lars von Trier first made a name for himself directing a prodigiously deranged trilogy of films about the traumas of 20th-century Europe (The Element of Crime, Epidemic, and Europa), but it was his 1994 television outing, a medical-supernatural miniseries co-directed with Morten Amfred, that brought him international acclaim and helped establish the rigorous style that he would formalize one year later with Dogme 95. A singular blend of horror, humor, and melodrama, The Kingdom I centers around the neurosurgical ward of Rigshospitalet—Denmark’s most technologically advanced hospital, which happens to be built on top of old bleaching ponds in Copenhagen—where strange and otherworldly events have started to occur, much to the dismay of doctors and patients: a child’s voice cries out to a patient in an elevator shaft, a phantom ambulance appears and disappears, and a pregnant doctor’s fetus grows at unnatural speed. Perhaps the most eccentric, turbulent television series of the 1990s after Twin Peaks, four-episode The Kingdom unfolds, as the critic Howard Hampton put it in Film Comment, “As if St. Elsewhere were infiltrated by the restless souls of Poltergeist.” A MUBI release. Restored from the original S16mm prints by Zentropa. 

Please note: There will be a 30-minute intermission during the screening.