@gq “Coppola’s next move is to step in front of the camera, in a trio of short films called ‘The Danish Trilogy’ in which he is a triple threat: writer, director, and lead actor. The first short of the trio, ‘Ode To Joy,’ follows an 18th-century Danish prince who has been dropped into modern times. The ten-minute-ish film is delightful to watch, but somewhat tricky to explain. It’s inspired by the Dogme 95 movement, an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish auteurs Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, which sought to simplify filmmaking by eliminating special effects, superficial actions, and temporal shifts. ‘Ode To Joy’ follows some of these rules and makes up a few more—the film does not include any dialogue, relying instead on about ten minutes of rigorous physical acting by Coppola. In one vignette, we see Coppola, in period aristocratic garb, fighting at a fencing club to a techno track ripped from a runway show, as if in a “really chaotic opera,” as Coppola puts it. Coppola is interested in exploring glitches in our matrixes of perception, and the film falls into what you might call covid-era cinema: a bite-sized epic about what happens when a carefully curated world is penetrated by forces beyond our control.” “Ode to Joy” (Part One) of ‘The Danish Trilogy’ out now. Link in bio. Words by @samuelhine