Into the Deep

Director: Emma Sullivan

Institute History

  • 2020 Sundance Film Festival

Description

On August 10, 2017, in an event that transfixed the world, Danish inventor Peter Madsen brutally murdered Swedish journalist Kim Wall on his homemade submarine in the waterways outside Copenhagen. A year earlier, filmmaker Emma Sullivan had started documenting Madsen; his projects, including building a rocket to become the first amateur astronaut; and the group of enthusiastic helpers drawn to his workshop to help build them. Through this shocking sequence of events and astonishing filmmaking by Sullivan, the horrible truth of what happened to Wall can be told as never before.

Moving back and forth from before Wall’s disappearance to after, Sullivan shows how Madsen’s seemingly affable and charismatic personality concealed a dark side. As Madsen’s workers are left grappling with who exactly he was and their own possible complicity in what happened, their own memories and Sullivan’s footage become part of the evidence against him. Terrifying in only the way reality can be, Into the Deep shows you a human monster hiding in plain sight.

Closed captioning, audio description, and enhanced audio for assistive listening are available for this film.

— S.S.

Screening Details

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