They Caught the Ferry

An unusual - but no less startling – entry in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s filmography, They Caught the Ferry is a fast-paced and effective road-safety film.

A young couple race against time to catch a ferry at Nyborg; as you’d expect from a public information film, it doesn’t end happily and Dreyer fulfils the promise of the film’s title with particularly Scandinavian poeticism.

Renowned for his stately and relatively slow-paced style, They Caught the Ferry is by some distance the most dynamic work in Dreyer’s oeuvre – critic David Bordwell noted there were more shots in this 12-minute film than in all of his feature film Gertrud.