A hunting trip turns into a nightmare, when a teenage boy has to choose between his father's acceptance or his own integrity. Original Title Træer Malet i Tjære Year of production 2024 Length 14' CountryDenmark, France Shooting Format 4K Aspect Ratio 1.37:1 Dialogue Danish Director Casper Rudolf Production Snowglobe Producer Giulia Triolo Co- production Protest Studios Co-producer Romain Bent Executive Producers Eva Jakobsen, Katrin Pors, Mikkel Jersin Script Michael Kunov Cinematographer Tobias Scavenius Editor Louis Bülov Berthelsen Sound Design & Mix Patrick Svaneberg Vejen Music Andreas Kildedal Westmark Production Design Sofie Bonde Lenau Costume Design Sophia Ladegaard Hair & Makeup DesignFrida Dammegaard Søllested Cast Magnus Juhl Andersen, Søren Malling, Thomas Guldberg Madsen, Anders Kristian Aamodt, Gustav Scavenius
Director’s Statement Trees Painted in Tar is a film about masculinity and group behaviour told through the perspective of a young man, who strives, but ultimately fails to fit in a group of hunters. By using hunting as a performance of masculinity I seek to look at what it means to be a man today. I want to use hunting as a way of looking at male groups and masculinity, both how they behave and interact with each other, but also how hunting relates to a very toxic part of masculinity and its relation to nature. Hunting has become an act of looking back to the day when killing in the name of survival was praised and a man's ability to do so made him useful in the eyes of the group. It has become a sport, but it carries tremendous symbolic value. For our young protagonist, hunting is an initiation ritual in a group of exclusively men. I have always felt distanced yet drawn to masculine groups. The way men interact and behave when they are together is both violent and tender. I have always felt like I was on the outside looking in, not knowing how to act and talk in order to be accepted by the group. Feeling left out has created a lifelong fascination with such groups and this project is a culmination of those observations. I want to take a closer look at the dynamics of a group of men, who all perform their masculinity through hunting. To open up the story, we follow a young man who is an outsider to the group, trying to integrate into it. The conflict that I connect to personally and that I find interesting, is that the outsider does not perform his masculinity the same way as the rest of the men. What interests me is looking at what happens when he compromises those morals in order to fit in. Can he be a man in the eyes of the group if he doesn’t adhere to the same practices? Is he truly a man, if he can’t kill an animal without showing remorse? The idea of what it means to be a man is enduring an existential crisis in the modern day, the old way of performing masculinity is under scrutiny and it leaves a lot of men feeling lost. The animalistic interactions and immediate way that men are together, has been socially accepted for many years, but it is no longer considered healthy. This leaves an entire generation of men behind and the story of our film is about those left behind. I want to investigate what happens when a young man who isn’t raised hyper masculine has to integrate into a group of extremely manly men. What happens when he tries to emulate them? What happens to his moral and person, when he compromises everything to become part of the group?
