Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value just swept the European Film Awards (The Oscars of Europe) on Saturday, winning Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Actress, and Score.

(They don’t have a category for Supporting Actress, or it would probably have won that, too.)

It is, in my opinion, the best film of 2025 by a wide margin, so this is richly deserved.

But one of the most important creatives behind the film wasn’t even nominated: the film's editor Olivier Bugge Coutté.

And yet multiple acceptance speeches singled out their gratitude to him.

I think awards ceremonies like the Oscars train us to believe that the role of an editor is to whittle down a large mass of footage into a shorter film.

Or, if not that, then to draw attention to itself with many, many quick cuts.

(It’s actually surprising how little recognition Sentimental Value has gotten for editing, given it opens with a dense montage that is obviously constructed in the editing room.)

But editing is also where performances are constructed, often from a sea of options, and where the final draft of the screenplay gets written.

When Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt won for Screenplay, Eskil thanked two key collaborators: Trier, the director, who brought their script to life, and Coutté, the editor, who co-wrote the final draft.

But I was especially struck by actress Renate Reinsve’s speech, which also thanked Bugge Coutté.

Because what an editor does for a performer almost never gets recognized.

Reinsve does her best work in the film in reaction shots, where she isn’t speaking, but we get to watch her in a long uncut take.

It’s the editor’s job to figure out which version of her performance in any given scene to choose, how long to hold on it, when to cut away from it, and when to cut to it.

The version of Reinsve’s performance we see was shaped in the edit.

If a film is well edited, the editing becomes invisible. It is guiding us through the story and amplifying our emotional response without us ever being aware of it.

(And I wish that awards didn’t just go to MOST editing but to BEST editing.)

The irony is that the opening montage of Sentimental Value — and of many of Trier’s other films — is all quick cuts that layer sound, image, and voiceover in a way that unmistakably requires a lot of editing.

But since it’s doing what it’s supposed to — pulling us into an emotional journey with this family — even people whose job is editing (the people who decide the nominees) might forget to notice.

Alex

P.S. I’m running a short program in February called The Deep Focus: Oslo. August 31st, where we’ll delve deep into Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st as a lens for viewing Sentimental Value.

And we'll kick things off by spending 90 minutes on the first 3 minutes of Oslo — a dense montage with stellar work from Coutté that sets up how the film delivers catharsis and shapes what we feel before we realize it.
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