Queen of Hearts

Winner: Danish Film Awards for Best Film, Actress, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Cinematography (and more!)

Winner: Sundance Audience Award 2019

“An insidious tale that delineates the transformation of a successful professional woman’s personal conduct from supremely self-confident to malevolently manipulative and beyond.” - Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter

Anne, a brilliant and dedicated lawyer specializing in children and young adults, lives what appears to be the picture-perfect life with her doctor husband Peter and their twin daughters. When her estranged teenage stepson Gustav moves in with them, Anne’s escalating desire leads her down a dangerous rabbit hole which, once exposed, unleashes a sequence of events that threatens to destroy her world.

QUEEN OF HEARTS explores the making of a tragic family secret step by step, as the consequences of hubris, lust, and lies conspire to create an unimaginable dilemma.

About director May el-Toukhy:

May el-Toukhy was born in Charlottenlund, Denmark and attended the National Film School of Denmark. Her first feature film, LONG STORY SHORT (2015), follows a group of friends over 30 in changing, complex, and imperfect relationships, set over eight different gatherings through the years.

May el-Toukhy truly exploded on the scene with her follow-up film QUEEN OF HEARTS, which won the Audience Award at Sundance and took almost all honors at the Danish Film Awards.

In an interview with Medium at Sundance, May spoke about the stories that excite her: “I have longed to see complex and nuanced female characters on screen. I think on-screen equality is not going to happen if we just reproduce the same old good-natured female characters. We have to dare to expose both women that do good and women that do bad in order to be relevant for a contemporary audience.”

She is currently working on a biopic of the extraordinary and complex life of Danish author Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast and lived on an African cattle and coffee farm amidst the battles of World War I.