Pelle the Conqueror

Late in the nineteenth century, the widowed Swedish farmer Lasse Karlsson and his young son Pelle leave their impoverished home for the Danish island of Bornholm, which they imagine as a promised land. Lasse finds work as a farmhand, but the wages are meagre, and both father and son are treated as outsiders by the local community. Pelle grows up among the other labourers and the landlord's household, enduring hardship and humiliation while holding on to the hope of a better life that first set the two of them on the road.

Pelle the Conqueror is a Danish-Swedish drama directed by Bille August, the first of the fifteen films he has directed in chronological order, ahead of The House of the Spirits. August wrote the screenplay with Bjarne Reuter and Per Olov Enquist, and Per Holst produced. Pelle Hvenegaard plays the boy, with Max von Sydow as his father, alongside Erik Paaske, Björn Granath, Astrid Villaume and Axel Strøbye among a credited cast of fifty. It runs 157 minutes.

On TMDB the film holds 7.3 out of 10 from 169 votes, while its critics' rating stands at 6.6 out of 10 from 25 reviews, so audiences have rated it somewhat more warmly than critics. Released in December 1987, it remains one of the most widely seen Danish productions of its era.