Limbo (2014)

The film was shot in Nakskov on Lolland, where it is also set, and the town and its surroundings play a significant role in the film. Hartmann has accordingly called Nakskov the film’s third main character. The people we follow are a group of students at the town’s upper-secondary school, especially the taciturn Sara (played by Annika Nuka Mathiassen), a third-year student. She falls in love with Karen (Sofia Nolsø), a newly arrived teacher under whose guidance the students are rehearsing Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Karen, however, turns Sara down with well-meaning, teacherly concern, which deeply hurts her and has tragic consequences. In scenes around town, tractors unload sugar beets at the town’s only remaining factory (Nakskov Sugar Factory). The title “Limbo,” which literally refers to a kind of void or in-between state, can be understood as a metaphor for a dying provincial town—a community in limbo, but also for the young people of Lolland, who are at a transitional stage between childhood and adulthood. In their hometown, their only prospects are to work at the sugar factory, and their only diversion is drunken nights out at bars furnished with plastic furniture. Thus, according to a review in Filmmagasinet Ekko, the film’s deliberately bleak atmospheric images make its portrait of the town seem at once exotic and sadly unfamiliar: an upper-secondary-school town in “Peripheral Denmark,” from which bright young people seek exile in the big city as soon as they are able to—like Hartmann herself, who grew up in Nakskov but later moved to Berlin, where she trained and raised the money to shoot Limbo. At the same time, the residents are portrayed with solidarity and sympathy, and the people in the film—the girls at the school, the young men from the sugar factory who meet them at the bar, and Karen, the drama teacher—are generally kind and decent to one another.