Joachim Trier in The Hollywood Reporter's TIFF Studio. Kayla Rocca For his latest film, Joachim Trier is playing it straight. In his career to date, the Danish-Norwegian director has often pivoted between realism and moments where irony and the surreal puncture the everyday. Think of the dream-like narrative in his debut Reprise (2006) where the lives of two aspiring Oslo writers are told via jump-cut flash-forwards and imagined futures that undercut his characters' youthful ambitions; of Thelma (2017), a sexual coming-of-age tale where a devout young woman's suppressed desire manifests as telekinetic powers; or of the transcendent moment of cinematic magic in The Worst Person in the World (2021), when time stops as our heroine Julie (Renate Reinsve) runs through Oslo, past the city's frozen citizens, in her escape from her ex-lover towards her future one. Related Stories Movies 'The Christophers' Review: Michaela Coel's Steely Self-Possession and Ian McKellen's Scalding Wit Are an Irresistible Match in Steven Soderbergh's Tart Art Comedy Movies TIFF Hidden Gem: World's First Deaf Thriller 'Retreat' Is Just the Beginning for Sign Language Cinema There are no such moments in Sentimental Value (2025). For the family drama, about a film director father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard), estranged from his two adult daughters, theater actress Nora (Reinsve) and academic historian Agnes (newcomer Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), Trier drops the irony. "I grew up in the '90s. I come from irony," explains Trier, "but with this one, I needed to talk about intimate, more tender things. That matters to me now, and I don't want to be ashamed of it." But telling a story straight doesn't mean making it simple. Sentimental Value piles on layers of memory, cinema and cinema-as-memory to explore the reconciliatory power of art - and its real-world limits. When Nora and Agnes' mother dies, father Gustav returns. He's written a new film, directly inspired by his own mother's tragic story, that he thinks could be his great comeback. He wants daughter Nora to star in it. When she refuses, he casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and tries to get Kemp to mimic Nora in her performance. All this plays out against the Borg's family home in Oslo, an old-world cottage that looks sprung from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but holding generations of memories and trauma, embedded in its walls. Sentimental Value premiered in Cannes, winning the festival's runner-up Grand Prize, and is screening at the Toronto International Film Festival as it launches its award-season run. (Norway has picked it as its contender in the best international feature category). Trier spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about childhood memories and generational trauma, about the healing power of art and how becoming a father changed the stories he wants to tell. The family home plays a central role in this film. What's your strongest memory from your childhood home? I don't know if I remember one memory above all the others, but what I can say is the repetition of a spatial experience. If I think about the area where I enter the front door, I can leaf through it like layers of time: The winter coming home sad, the summer coming home happy, slamming the door during an argument, taking off my shoes and sitting on the floor tired from something. All of life happened in that same space. That becomes the framework of life and memory, and cinema can play with that. So I was thinking about spaces like that in this film. Not so much my family's house, because we moved a lot. It was my grandparents' house that was the continuous one, and that was being sold when [co-screenwriter Eskil] Vogt and I wrote this. Was that the initial trigger for the story? Not the story, but the context for it. I realized all of the 20th century had happened in that house. That house became a discussion between Eskil and I. To start in a slightly different place, I'd say I've had two kids since the last movie, and I've asked myself questions about what I transfer to them and what was transferred to me. Realizing, for example, the trauma of my grandfather during the war - he was a resistance fighter, he barely survived, and then he became a film director - he wasn't like Gustav Borg but the idea of that history affected my family. War has affected my family in many specific and unspecific ways. Does it take three generations to get rid of that? Then, when I look at my kids, I think: Will they be as affected by the 20th century as I was? And the house witnessed all that. The house is the witness. Does that make sense? It's hard to talk about it without being a bit philosophical. I don't mean to pretend that I can get all that into a movie, but I think some of those notions came into it. Renate Reinsve (left) and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value. Courtesy of Kasper Tuxen/Mubi This film is incredibly direct, open and honest. It doesn't have any irony or cinematic tricks like we s