Coming to NYC’s Stranger Than Fiction next Tuesday, March 1: LOVE ON DELIVERY
Janus Metz’s hour-long documentary on Thai mail order brides in Denmark screened in IDFA in 2008 before coming stateside the next year at SXSW and Full Frame, where I was on a jury that awarded the film the HBO Emerging Filmmaker Award in 2009.
Before he wowed audiences with ARMADILLO (beginning at Cannes and continuing at festivals like Karlovy Vary and Toronto), Metz directed this portrait of a community of Thai women who have left their homes over the past 15 years for marriages of convenience with Danish men. The film focuses on the women’s respected leader of sorts, Sommai, who works in a fish factory, as she makes arrangements for her visiting niece Kae to find a husband so she can stay in Denmark. LOVE ON DELIVERY features beautiful cinematography and editing, and depicts a sensitive subject with elegant restraint, with what’s not said between the men and women – sometimes due to the language barrier, but not always – oftentimes more important than what is said. The result is an at times transcendent story about life, love, and economy across cultures.
The event will include a Q&A with Metz and his collaborator, the anthropologist Sine Plambech, who contributed to the screenplay for LOVE ON DELIVERY.
what (not) to doc 