The Danish film In a Better World revives something that many thought was dead since at least the 1980s, since the mastery of DNA splicing and organ transplanting (posthuman), since the reduction of human beings to rational actors and human bodies to human capital (postindustrial), since the end of politics (postnational): hardcore humanist principles (kindness to others, resistance to violence, promotion of peaceful solutions). The director Susanne Bier has reanimated humanism! Better yet, her movie, which won the 2011 Academy Award for best foreign language film (the art-house section of the gaudy event), seems to be unaware of the death of humanism, seems to have been made with the idea that social democratic values are still very much alive. This is the impressive innocence of a In a Better World.

Like Kathrine

Windfeld's The Escape (another Danish film), World attempts to coordinate one human reality (life in a rich, secular democracy) with another distant human reality (life in an impoverished, corrupt, war-torn, religious society). On the one side, we see evil as diurnal, as petty, as a bully in a schoolyard, or as a mean-spirited parent. This evil is coordinated with the larger, more horrific evil of an African warlord who rapes and kills young women. The first evil is seen as the bud, the start of what can grow into murder, mayhem, and madness. The film goes back and forth: Now we are in a quiet town in Denmark dealing with parenting issues, with a marriage that has hit the rocks, with a boy's existential confusion; now we are in the middle of a desert in North Africa—there is no respite from the blood, pain, worms, and heat. What connects the two realities is a doctor who deals with a family crisis at home in Demark and a humanitarian crisis in North Africa.

But humanism in our age, the global age, will certainly be inadequate if it is not negotiated and coordinated between these extremes. The film's ultimate message? We must take petty evil as seriously full-blown evil.