The Hunt
The Hunt is a powerful and disturbing depiction of how quickly a lie can become the truth when gossip, doubt and malice are allowed to flourish.
Following a tough divorce, 40-year-old Lucas is starting to pull his life back together again. He has a new girlfriend, a new job, and is in the process of re-establishing his relationship with his teenage son Marcus.
However one passing remark threatens Lucas’s newfound stability. One of the children he looks after at the nursery where he works, a little girl with a vivid imagination, tells a random lie which is impossible to ignore.
Her allegation spreads like a virus, quickly acquiring the veneer of truth the more it is told. As shock turns to mistrust and then malice, it doesn’t take long before this small community is in a collective state of hysteria, igniting a witch-hunt that threatens to destroy an innocent man’s life.
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg - co-founder of the Dogme movement and director of the award-winning international hit Festen - The Hunt won the Best Actor prize (Mads Mikkelsen), as well as the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (Thomas Vinterberg) and the Vulcain Prize for Technical Artist (to Director of Photography Charlotte Bruus Christensen) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it screened to critical acclaim In Competition.
Mads Mikkelsen first came to public attention in Nicolas Winding Refn’s debut Pusher in 1996.
Throughout his career he has worked both in his native Denmark, most notably in Susanne Bier’s Oscar-nominated After the Wedding and this year in A Royal Affair, and internationally, where his credits including Bond Villain Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, Clash of the Titans and The Three Musketeers. In 2012 he was awarded the prestigious European Film Award for Achievement in World Cinema.
The Hunt is produced by Sisse Graum Jørgensen and Morten Kaufmann for Zentropa Entertainments29 in coproduction with Film I Väst and Zentropa International Sweden with support from The Danish Film Institute, DR, Eurimages, Nordisk Film & TV Fond, Svenska Film Institutet, SVT and the MEDIA Programme of the European Union.
The Hunt is released November 30th