Work commitments have made me a tad late to the party on this one, so I hope you’ve found your own way to this all time favourite festival. If not make sure you cancel everything this weekend and catch at least one of these movies before it closes.
I did manage to get to the preview movie, What Will People Say which was both moving and very hard to watch in some places.
What Will People Say
Set in Norway, Nisha (Maria Mozhdah) is your typical teenager, slipping out at night to catch up with friends. One night she sneaks her boyfriend into her room and as they sit innocently on her bed chatting, her father (Adil Hussain) opens the door. Despite her protests of innocence he doesn’t believe her and so she is shipped off to family in Pakistan, with the aim of minimizing the family’s shame. What follows is a series of increasingly difficult to watch twists and turns as her father tries to deal with his wayward daughter.
Mozhdah delivers such a compelling performance your heart aches for her and you just want to yell at the screen ‘but she didn’t do anything.’ Frustrating and immensely sad, but I can say that if you do see it, it will get you thinking, debating and the images will stay with you for weeks afterwards.
Others on my list are:
A Horrible Woman A comedy about a controlling girlfriend, which won Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay at the Danish Academy Awards. Told from the boyfriends point of view is she really as manipulative as he says or is there something else at work?
Word Of God. Another drama, comedy from Denmark, this story revolves around Uffe, the self-appointed ‘God’ or patriarch of a family living in the 1980’s. As a self-styled psychologist he holds sessions in the home while in his dressing gown and underwear, and when faced with a health scare he decided to write his autobiography. Also in the mix are his three sons who decide to take on God, while their mother tries, as mothers do, to keep the family unit together.
U- July 22. When I first heard about this movie I wasn’t that convinced. Cast your mind back to July 2011 when a man attacked 500 youths on a political camp near Oslo. Why would I want to live through that again, we know the outcome? But then I read that it is a fictionalised account of what happened from the point of view of one of the victims and it runs as a single 72 minute take, which was the duration of the attach. Maybe I’m in reality show debt but this could be interesting, particularly as it may also take a look at the media’s involvement.
Okay so they are my three tips for this weekend, or for when they pop up out of festival.
For more information go to Luna Cinema or Scandinavian Film Festival.
