Norwegian childhood documentary shown at Shanghai film festival

By Liao Fangzhou Source:Global Times Published: 2016/7/5 18:58:00

Last month saw the second edition of Shanghai's Beyond Frozen Point Film Festival, during which 14 films from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Greenland were shown.

The festival organizers do not see its focus, which is climate change, confined to weather phenomena. Instead, the films scrutinize changes in people's mental state. Termed "Stories of the North," the festival opened with the screening of Norwegian documentary Brothers.

In the film, director-cinematographer Aslaug Holm documents her two sons, Lukas and Markus, for more than eight years, from toddlers to teenagers, to capture their childhood, maturation and brotherly relationship.

Common language

Consul General of Norway in Shanghai Øyvind Stokke, who opened the festival, pointed out that screenings of the kind are important because cinema is a common language.

"We've both watched films, we can recognize the same images and things and we've seen how to grow up and grow older," Stokke said.

In an interview with Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, where Brothers premiered, Holm said she hoped her work would do something good for the audience.

"(I hope) that you can see true moments and the whole world in a small raindrop in everyday life. And when you see the film you can remember your own childhood and memories from years passing," Holm said.

Brothers was later screened at this year's Dublin International Film Festival as part of a film program aimed at young people. It took top jury prize (aka the best international feature documentary prize) in May at the 2016 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

Film critic Guy Lodge called the film "delightful and distinctive enough" to withstand the Boyhood (an award-winning 2014 American independent coming-of-age film by Richard Linklater) comparisons, in an article in US entertainment magazine Variety.

"Holm's deft editing, invaluably aided by a mother's good memory, often picks out directly opposing statements from the same lips, wryly demonstrating the dramatic reversals in thinking that a mere year can bring to human works in progress.

"Holm has an eye and ear for her children's own idiosyncrasies and brands of wit, though she also recognizes when they begin to peel away from the family unit in ways and directions even the camera can't pursue," wrote Lodge.

Without a plan

Martha Otte, director of the 2016 Tromsø International Film Festival, also attended the Shanghai screening. "The director started on the project without a plan, and after eight years of shooting, it took her a long time to edit because she needed an angle and a story to tell. It is about relationships, identity, family and also connections to place, in her case from a very small place in the west coast of Norway to Oslo," Otte told the Global Times.

She added that during the course of filming, the director realized that it was not for her as a parent to teach and "form human beings" but that the children already had their own identities.

"Brothers shows what happens when parents want one thing for their kids but kids want other things, and when do parents learn they have to let kids find the way. The beauty of cinema is that it takes a very local, personal story like this to an audience in the world and they can recognize themselves in it," Otte said.

She said Norway does not have a long history or a large amount of films in its national repertoire, and is at the moment a "dawning" scene. But she believes the country enjoys good technical and production talents.

"The artistic films that get to the rest of the world, but not so much to China, are philosophical," Otte said, adding that the country also makes comedies but they don't travel so well because people elsewhere might find it difficult to get their humor.

"I know people in the world expect Norwegian films to be dark, but you need to see them and then make up own minds about them," Otte said.''



 


 

Stills from Brothers during a screening in Shanghai



 

Guests at the opening of Beyond Frozen Point Film Festival

Photos: Courtesy of the Consulate General of Norway in Shanghai




Newspaper headline: Stories of the north


Posted in: Metro Shanghai

blog comments powered by Disqus