Intense Pictures of the North

International Herald Tribune (Wednesday, April 17th, 1991)

NEW YORK — A beautiful, dripping wet troll, clad only in rags, stands mutely by the edge of the Norwegian sea, her eyes scanning the horizon (for the meaning of life?), impervious to the waves ricocheting around her.

An earnest young theological student, sent by the bishop of Reykjavik to investigate the bizarre doings near Iceland‘s eerie, majestic Snaefells glacier, argues with an apparently demented man who is calmly blasting away at some seagulls with a pistol.

A hapless Russian soldier, part of the first wave of Stalin’s assault on Finland in 1939, brainwashed into believing that his Finnish captors will torture him, holds a hand grenade close to his body and blows himself up, in slow motion, as his stunned escorts dive for cover.

These are some of the typically quirky, intense, thoroughly Nordic scenes —respectively from Eva Dahr‘s short “Troll” (Norway), Gudny Halldorsdottir’s “Under the Glacier” (Iceland), and Pekka Parikka’s epic “Winter War" (Finland) — that linger in the mind after the four-day Nordic Film Festival in New York.

Designed as a celebration of the continued variety and vitality of Scandinavian cinema, the festival, organized by the American Scandinavian Foundation, contained a breathtakingly wide range of features, shorts, and documentaries produced over the last five years by Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. In addition to the films mentioned, which were having their American premieres, the festival included two new Swedish political melodramas by Suzanne Ostend (“Guardian Angel") and Kjell Grede (“Good Evening. Mr. Wallenberg") and an expose of the male psyche by the feminist Norwegian director Anja Breien ("Twice Upon a Time").

The boosterish mood of the event was set on opening night, when Ingmar Bergman’s Oscar-winning cinematographer, Sven Nyquist, was given the (you guessed it) Ingmar Bergman Award. The director Alan Pakula (who worked with Nyquist on “Starting Over") made an effusive presentation as the cinematographer reddened in embarrassment.

Perhaps the happiest contingent at the festival, in accord perhaps with the number of Oscars they have won over the last few years, was the Danish one.

"I am very optimistic about the future of cinema in my country," said Anne Wivel, whose dance documentary, “Giselle," made its premiere at the festival. Wivel, whose peculiar style falls between fiction and documentary, said the hardest scene to make in her film was the one in which her protagonist, the veteran ballet master Henning Kronstam, induces his ballerina to go berserk, and nearly does so himself. Kronstam's tragic visage, etched in silhouette and klieg lights was another of the festival's memorable images.

The Norwegians are proud of the Oscar nomination for “The Pathfinder,“ 1988 medieval saga about the Lapp people. John Jacobson, producer of “The Pathfinder," noted that Norway's special system of film distribution, wherein municipalities own movie theaters and decide what fare will play there, is one of the major factors keeping film alive in Norway. By contrast, the Swedes and the Finns, with a dimmer financial outlook for a film in their countries, were noticeably gloomier.

All agreed that the American film industry poses the greatest threat to the survival of Nordic film. Thus, even in Denmark — general]y regarded as the "hottest" of the Nordic countries in film — of the 841 films screened last year, only 186 were Danish-made. Most of the remainder were American, Lissy Bellaiche, head of the Danish Film Institute‘s foreign department said. Nevertheless, Bellaiche is optimistic that this trend can be countered by the growing amount of cooperation between Nordic countries as well as by the increased funds that will be available for film production with European integration.

Meanwhile, Bellaiehe is agitating for her government to put more money into the cinema.  “ ‘Babette‘s Feast’ and ‘Pelle the Conqueror' have done as much for our national image as our soccer team.“ she insists. In all about 50 feature films were made in Scandinavia last year — roughly the same as 10 years ago.

Most of the participants agreed that the recent phenomenon of women directors in Scandinavian cinema was essentially a happy coincidence. “No big deal," is the way Gudny Halldorsdottir described her experience making “Under the Glacier,” adapted from a novel by her father, the Nobel Prize-winning writer Halldor Laxness. For her next project, a film about the Eskimos of Greenland, Halldorsdottr says, “I‘m going to be the script girl!”