Dagur Kari, Island/Denmark
Fusi is a forty-three-year old man who is sleepwalking through life.  He is living with his mother and works at the airport as a baggage handler who is constantly being bullied by his co-workers. He has never had a girlfriend and, from the looks of it, will never find one either.  He is large and extremely over weight as well as very shy.  His only form of entertainment is building up and playing with WW2 battle reenactment models.  His life is lonely but he never exhorts himself to do much more than is necessary. It isn’t until his mother has a new boyfriend and he gives Fusi a birthday present for a cowboy line dance course and a little girl who moves in downstairs and tries to befriend  Fusi that he realizes he might be missing something in life.  The film plays with our prejudices; at one point we have the feeling that he is a pedophile and soon realize that he is only a very lonely person who is good hearted and would never hurt anyone and that the surrounding people are the ones who are not the kind ones. It is a coming-of-age story for a dormant man who will probably have his midlife crisis when he is eighty years old. (Shelly Schoeneshoefer)