With quiet humor replacing the biting wit and cynical outlook of one of the best-known Dogme 95 works, Thomas Vinterberg's "The Celebration"--about a prodigal son's return for his father's 60th birthday and the skeletons that are released from the rich man's closets--"Italiensk for begyndere" (as it's known in its Danish language) hones in on six lonely people in a bleak Copenhagen neighborhood. Ms. Scherfig doesn't show us much of the outside world, preferring to let us in on her perspective by capturing the males in the picture from a female director's point of view.

Each of the half dozen people who look for love has a particular weakness making the task of finding a mate all the more difficult. Jorgen Mortensen (Peter Gantzler) manages a hotel in a sports complex with a crush on the Italian waitress, Giulia (Sara Indrio Jensen). His impotence coupled with the server's inadequacies in the Danish language make their relationship a difficult one at best. His best friend who works as a waiter, Hal-Finn (Lars Kaalund), is to be fired for belligerence but he is to expose his soft side in his relationship with a female barber, Karen (Ann Eleonora Jorgensen. Olympia (Anette Stovelbaek), a youthful woman and terminally clumsy woman who claims to have had 43 jobs in the past few years is to find her soul mate in the town's new pastor, Andreas (Anders W. Berthelsen), who was recently widowed and who takes flak from the suspended and dyspeptic elder preacher.

It's not difficult to see why this entry into the Toronto , New York and Telluride Film Festivals has garnered several awards, including the Silver Bear in Berlin and the FIPRESCI prize for advancing the Dogme 95 technique. The story is intimate, credible, and funny and you can bet that most of us in the audience--none of us Danes, presumably--could identify with one of more of these klutzy characters, giving the most inept among us cause for hope.