Lost Generation

Industrialist Mogens Gregersen and his wife Tilde have five children when the film opens in 1954. But they are largely oblivious to the younger generations’ secrets – Bo is gay, Maj is a dropout, Karen is an abuse victim, Rune steals from his mother, and Erik fathers a child out of wedlock. Over the following 20 years, the centrifugal forces within the family and the cracks in their upper-class façade spill into public view. Mogens is not spared when reporters uncover the patriarch’s speculative real estate deals … The film is an adaptation of a quartet of novels by Christian Kampmann (1939—1988), whereby in his Gregersen saga, the writer confronted his "Danish Buddenbrooks" with things that would have been unthinkable in its German predecessor – alcohol and drug abuse, adultery, incest, suicide. Caustic, but with a bit of humour, this modern "decline of a family" chronicle unmasks the characters’ life of lies against the panoramic backdrop of Danish history from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s – including youth in revolt, the search for new lifestyles, and women’s emancipation.