‘The Commune’ Clip: House Rules Explained In Thomas Vinterberg’s Personal Period Pic

EXCLUSIVE: The Hunt helmer Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last year and is being released by Magnolia this weekend in New York and Los Angeles. The period drama is loosely based on Vinterberg’s childhood experiences growing up as part of a collective in 1970s Copenhagen. Above is a clip that discusses “house rules” with some cheeky input by one of the young potential renters. Magnolia expands next weekend with further theatrical runs slated for the beginning of June.

The film stars Trine Dyrholm (who won the Silver Bear for Best Actress in Berlin) and Ulrich Thomsen, reteaming with Vinterberg after his 1998 breakout Festen, along with a large ensemble. It centers on a professor and his TV newswoman wife who suggests they invite their friends to come and live with them in a recently inherited house. She’s hoping to evade the boredom that has begun to seep into their marriage. Before long, a dozen women, men and children move in, make collective decisions, engage in discussions, frolic together — and rub each other the wrong way.

Vinterberg, whose The Hunt was nominated for an Oscar and won Mads Mikkelsen the Best Actor prize in Cannes 2012, co-wrote The Commune with frequent collaborator and A War Oscar nominee Tobias Lindholm. He has called it “a love declaration to my childhood. There was a time when people were sharing and those days are over and I miss that. It’s a film about the impermanence of things. Time disappears, love disappears, life disappears and things are suddenly over and I’ll never learn to figure out why.”

“Any new film from Thomas Vinterberg is a reason to celebrate,” Magnolia’s Matt Cowal recently told Deadline. “The Commune is a very personal film for Thomas…. We were quite moved by it and have found audiences to be as well.”