Jóhann Jóhannsson

Copenhagen Dreams is director Max Kestner’s documentary film portrait of Denmark’s capital. It’s a film about the physical surroundings that are part of shaping our lives. About the buildings we wake up in, the front doors we walk out of, the streets we traverse. It is also a film about how the way we live our lives affects our physical surroundings. About the places we dream of and the walls onto which we scratch the names of our loved ones, before it’s too late.

It focuses on the city as a physical entity – quite literally. The people are usually out of focus or on the periphery of the framework that constitutes a central part of the film’s aesthetic. This is to establish that Copenhagen is the main character of the film; the people are just passing bit players whose job it is to draw out the distinctive features of the protagonist.

Music plays a big part in the film. According to Jóhann: “Max Kestner approached me about writing the music for his documentary about Copenhagen. For me the project echoed the silent “city symphonies”, like Ruttman’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Vigo’s A Propos De Nice, or Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera. Kestner’s film shares with those films a desire to capture the spirit, uniqueness, and poetry of a city by assembling images of everyday life in that city. It is documentary in the poetic mode and I tried to capture this mode in the music. The tone of Kestner’s film constantly shifts from the mundane to the lyrical, from the technocratic jargon of architects to the everyday banter of commuters and coffee house guests, from dry factual inventories to poetic meditations. I tried to reflect this in the music and to make the music the poetic voice of the city, so the music becomes a character of its own which binds the various levels of the film together.