Temporary Release

John is doing time in prison. He's a criminal from a Copenhagen slum neighborhood – a child of the ghetto. He's a survivor and he is getting old - too old for the criminal life. But he's also unrealistic. So, even though he's over fifty, he still sports a black, leather jacket and jeans, thick-soled shoes and an Elvis hair-do. He has been double-crossed by drug dealers who let him take the fall – and a long prison sentence - after the police bust a shipment of hash. He has a family with which he keeps little contact, but now his son is getting married. Prison rules allow him to attend the wedding, escorted by a prison officer.

We follow John and the prison guard during the course of the wedding day – a day that changes both their lives. It soon becomes apparent that, besides attending the wedding, John has other scores to settle that he doesn't want the guard finding out about. The prison officer is a younger, chubby "country boy" – apparently the essence of normality. But as the film progresses, he reveals his paranoia, his frustrations and his efforts to maintain an ideal, middle-class, family existence - by participating in organized crime. He conveys messages from the inmates to their criminal buddies on the outside and organizes the drug trade inside. No one suspects a decent fellow like him.

In the course of the movie both men's pasts unfold. Most of the action takes place in John's childhood neighborhood. Vesterbro is an old, working-class neighborhood and former slum that's been renovated and populated by young people. Time has clearly passed John by. In the course of the wedding we see John trying to play the father to a son who he has never really accepted, and the emotional confrontation shakes him up. After the wedding he looks up an old girlfriend – the prostitute Lisbeth – and promises his prison-guard escort Lisbeth's favors. But things go far from planned; Lisbeth is more interested in working for the guard then starting up again with John.

After visiting Lisbeth, John succeeds in ditching the guard and returns to Lisbeth, demanding an explanation. This leads to a confrontation where Lisbeth tells him it was she who had gotten him busted and that she did it for his own good, convinced that he'd never survive on the street. She ridicules him because he's impotent, causing him to fly into a rage and attack her. She falls down, hitting her head on the radiator. John flees, thinking she's dead. But, having nowhere to go, he returns to the prison where the officer is waiting for him. Such is the plot of the film - told in broad strokes. (official distributor synopsis)