Reviews

I was long waiting to see this movie: the black and white charm of the trailer, together with sounds of grunting, squeaking and clucking, familiar to anybody, made a refreshing impression of something different from what is usually shown in the wide release. The movie had no words or moralising, yet, when it ends one can hardly hold the tears. The plot is simple, telling a story of a sow with a litter of piglets and a few hens and cows living at a free-range farm. The camera catches their different emotions, daily joys and tragedies, which one can no longer observe once these animals reach the meat section in a grocery store. In that sense, the movie tells a story of deprived and miserable, farm animals who have no names, no voice and no right to exist in our consciousness. Their emotions are surprisingly human: curiosity of the piglets, tiredness of their mother, the will to life of the one-legged chicken, compassion of calves towards each other in defending from flies, the heartbreaking despair of the sow. The inherent unfairness of their lives vis-à-vis the lives of humans leaves a bitter feeling and a lump in the throat. It is a rare movie, which requires immersion in the dark atmosphere of a cinema, but rewards with empathy towards other beings and a warm feeling of unity with them.

I watched the movie after reading a review about it in Weekendavisen, where it was promoted as an opening movie for the 2020 Copenhagen Documentary Films Festival. The festival later went online due to the quarantine. The movie presents a careful observation of the relationship between Greenlanders and Danes, where the struggle for recognition of the former takes place on different levels: local politics, health and social services, natural resources, language. Its not the type of struggle we hear often on the mainstream media, its much more subtle, yet easy to relate with its well-crafted personal stories. The movie follows the best traditions of Scandinavian journalism and its allegiance to objective and neutral reporting.

The movie follows the line of 'Liberation day' (2016) and stars a controversial Norwegian artist and director Morten Traavik trying to establish dialogue and show North Korea to the world. Now instead of the Slobenian art-band Laibach, it's a group of diverse contemporary artists who visit the closed country. The movie is beautifully filmed and portrays the clash of cultures: while the Western culture is keen on originality, North Korean seems more concerned about the quality of performance. Both groups of Western and Korea artists talk about spiritual values conveyed through art, but the values themselves seem to be radically different. The movie has funny dialogues between the artists and the local curators and translators about the meaning of art, different lifestyles and the influence of ideology. It also reflects the different personalities of artists (eg the French provocative artists using human bones and his own blood in his works, or a German musician experimenting with infra- and ultra- sounds). A special thanks goes to the film's director Tommy Gulliksen for the Q&A session after premiere at the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival in March 2019.