When Martin’s big brother, Emil Langballe (“Theatre of Violence”), decided to become a filmmaker, his sibling had one request: he wanted a film made about him. The Danish documentarian spent years trying to figure out how to best capture his brother on screen. One day, Martin told Emil he and his best friend Casper had started a blog to chronicle their search for the perfect 1994 Honda Civic. Thus was born “Petrolheads,” world premiering at CPH:DOX and acquired for international sales by Verità Films (formerly Syndicado Film Sales).
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere, Langballe recalls how Martin was first brought into his family as a five-month-old foster baby, eventually joining the clan permanently. Soon after came a disability diagnosis. “My brother experienced this deep sense of loneliness as a young man,” says the director. “Then he met Casper, and they spoke freely about their feelings for each other. They finished each other’s sentences and spoke in this self-made slang where sometimes I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.”
“There was something about this friendship that I found beautiful,” adds the director. “Both of them felt quite excluded from society. They felt discriminated against because they would be refused from auto shops because people found them strange or weird. They had this underlying consciousness about being different while also sharing this warm friendship. I found that I would really love to make a film about that.”
Greg Rubidge, founder at Verità Films, says “Petrolheads” is “far more than a film about cars.” “It’s a deeply moving, often hilarious human story about the search for belonging. It reminded me of how cars brought fathers and sons together when I was growing up, and of the souped-up Civics cruising my Toronto neighborhood years later. Emil Langballe captures Martin and Casper’s most vulnerable moments with remarkable dignity. We’re thrilled to bring their journey to a global audience.”
“Petrolheads” chronicles Martin and Casper’s friendship as they roam car shops, scrapyards and many forums in search of Martin’s dream car. The duo’s relationship faces a great challenge, however, when Martin gets caught in a spiral of drug addiction, racking up debts and alienating himself from loved ones. But capturing that element wasn’t originally planned.
“When we started the film, my brother had never touched drugs or even liked alcohol,” explains the director. “Then, suddenly, once we had the financing in place and were about to start shooting, he fell into addiction for the first time. It was devastating. At first, I was hesitant to include that in the film, but Martin and Caspar immediately said otherwise and spoke about how Denmark and the Danish media landscape have only had feel-good portrayals of people with disabilities.”
And herein lies one of the great laurels of this moving Danish documentary: it refuses to portray its two subjects within the tight confines of their disabilities. Langballe does not spend much time dwelling on either Martin’s or Casper’s specific diagnosis or looking into how that might have affected their lives growing up. In “Petrolheads,” we see both men openly and honestly talk about their sorrows and joys, as well as their flaws and qualities.
“Both of them told me from the beginning that the film needed to be honest and have an edge,” says the filmmaker. “ They told me that it’s not fun to have this diagnosis and to feel different, and that needed to come across. For my parents, it was also important because they had been struggling their whole life to secure the best possible life for my brother, and they had witnessed all of his struggles. They also said there was no need to sugarcoat it.”
“Theatre of Violence,” courtesy of CPH:DOX
Langballe is far from a stranger when it comes to nuanced portrayals of marginalized communities, having made films about the relationship between a couple with Down Syndrome (“A Married Couple”), a Black barbershop in the Danish suburb of Vollsmose (“Qs Barbershop”) and Ugandan child soldiers (“Theatre of Violence”).
“My mother was a school teacher in an underprivileged area in Denmark and she had a lot of vulnerable students,” recalls the director. “Sometimes she would take them home for the weekend, which is also how she ended up fostering my brother. I have memories of our house being full of immigrant kids, different kids, all teaching me all sorts of things. It was a wonderful way of growing up.”
As he aged, however, Langballe started seeing the “same people being portrayed very negatively in the media, without any depth or nuance.” That experience made the director acutely aware of the power of documentary filmmaking. “The most important thing for me, in making and watching documentaries, is the notion that they can actually change how we view people. I’ve experienced this myself.”
“I hope, and this may be a naïve hope, that my films can also do that, in a way,” he adds.
As for the film’s visual style and structure, the director says he was directly influenced by spaghetti westerns and the work of Sergio Leone, as well as more modern directors playing with the genre to explore the nuances of male friendship, such as Kelly Reichardt’s “First Cow” and Joachim Trier’s “Reprise.” The documentarian purposefully brought composer Björn Olsson into the project due to his fame as “Denmark’s Ennio Morricone.” “I saw Martin and Casper as these two modern cowboys or outlaws, just the two of them against the world.”
Premiering the film in his home country is extra special for Langballe, who managed to realize another of Martin’s dreams in the process: playing at Copenhagen’s imposing Grand Teatret cinema. “For Martin, it was very important to have the premiere in this specific cinema in Copenhagen because it’s where I took him to see a friend’s premiere over 10 years ago. Since then, he’s been saying that, if we ever make a film together, it needs to premiere in that cinema. We’re taking his car to the front of the cinema with a red carpet and everything, so we are going to have a blast.”
“Petrolheads” is produced by Julie Friis Walenciak and Claes Hedlund at Paloma Productions. Verità Films handles sales.
