The Tree of Knowledge (Nils Malmros, 1981) - L.A. premiere preservation

Mezzanine presents: The Tree of Knowledge
L.A. premiere of a new digital preservation
Feb 20, 7:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives
Nils Malmros’s deeply personal coming-of-age film follows the rearranging social circles of a group of pre-adolescent school children in 1950s Denmark, whose wants and desires shift according to the season. When these children get fined for their misbehavior, it foregrounds the film’s economy of desire: as over a dozen individual personalities clash, gossip, and go dancing in the dark, an increasing desperation sets in at countless community gatherings, with never a dull moment-all while the most popular girl, Elin (Eva Gram Schjoldager) becomes a victim of her own prudishness. The caustic images of sexual awakening recall Goodbye, Columbus and the work of Maurice Pialat, as the film’s darting energy-filmed over two years to enhance the subjects’ precociousness-navigates intuitively between cruelty and grace.
Los Angeles premiere of a digital preservation from the Danish Film Institute
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Screened at the 1983 Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Filmex)
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Official Selection: Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival, 1982
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"The truest and most moving film I have ever seen about the experience of puberty... a creative act of memory about exactly what it was like to be 13 in 1953." -Roger Ebert
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"Malmros’s masterpiece... A series of exquisitely staged, expansive vignettes that accumulate with quietly shattering force." -Max Nelson, Film Comment