Angels in Fast Motion (2005)

"Angels in Fast Motion", or "Nordkraft" to give it its original Danish title, follows the fate of three youthful people in their twenties, as they each fight a personal battle with drugs that weaves together three distinct storylines. The film is an, unflinching and brutal story of addiction in a cruel and depressive world, but with a little thought of hope and love through its core. It all takes place in the grey Aalborg as a striking backdrop and we get introduced for Maria, Allan and Steso. Maria (_Signe Egholm Olsen_) is a pusher frau, as she call herself, or a drugs trafficker. She lives with her dealer boyfriend Asger (_Thomas L. Corneliussen_), a former doorman whose education as a tattooist is financed by drugs, that Maria smuggles in from Copenhagen. But Asger is unable to give her the love and affection she needs, so all the time Maria is waiting--Waiting for love. Suddenly Maria does not want to make any more trips and that leads to the introduction of Hossein (_Farshad Kholghi_), a Persian moneylender who has more going on than what he lets on to, and then she's caught between a rock and a hard place. Allan (_Claus Riis Østergaard_) is a sailor returning home from a long trip overseas the Pacific Ocean where he barely survived and got hardly injured. But he is still clean, and has been clean for years now. He wants to start a new life, and the last thing he wants is to be dragged into the world of drugs and smuggling that it took him so long to escape. But some ghosts are harder to remove, than others. And after a chance meeting with an old time kind of "friend", Frank (_Rudi Köhnke_), things are anything but safe. And Steso (_Thure Lindhardt_), an intellectual, god-forsaken and prophetic cynic junkie, has been a big drug addict since his early teens, and he still loves it. He takes advantage of his parents' guilty consciences to pay for his excessive drug abuse, while he is immersing himself in one politically critical book after another. He claims that the drugs are keeping him alive. But his soul mate, or rather said all-time girlfriend, Tilde (_Pernille Vallentin Brandt_) who has one foot in the psychiatric chair and the other in some dreamy, state of yellow and karma, has grown tired of taking care of him and picking him up when he's strung out or down. She really wants him to quit or at least take a big break, and though Steso feels so deep and true affection for her, drugs are so much part of his identity, that in giving them up, he would destroy his own character completely.