April 25, 2009 02:15PM EDT

Q&A: North

 

We’ll bet more than a few people looking for an extreme escape from the city booked tickets to rural Norway after Friday night’s premiere of North. In the film we meet Jomar (Anders Baasmo Christiansen, rightfully a big star in Scandinavia), a former professional skier who is languishing in a fit of depression and a lousy job as a ski lift operator when he discovers he has a five-year-old son living with his ex-girlfriend.

Propped up by pills and homemade moonshine, Jomar makes a rash decision to travel to her remote home in Norway's Far North. The encounters he has along the way—whether they’re with a kindhearted but lonely little girl or a shotgun-wielding backwoodsman—add a witty and unforgettable texture to his journey. The film’s stunning cinematography (by Philip Øgaard—again, one of the most famous in Scandinavia) manages to feel intimate while capturing a staggering scope, and even when he’s just a tiny dark blip traversing a boundless expanse of white hills and plains, Christiansen keeps us tied closely to his character.

Director Rune Denstad Langlo took the floor for a Q&A after the premiere with Christiansen and producers Sigve Endresen and Brede Hovland. Langlo, making his feature narrative debut after two critically acclaimed documentaries, revealed that he was originally intending only to produce the film. “As I started to work with the screenwriter [Erlend Loe], the film started to get more and more personal, and I couldn’t give it to anyone else,” he said.
 

Langlo got the idea for North three years ago, after visiting a ski cabin and meeting the men who ran it. “They were smelling of booze and yelling at me and didn’t look motivated for their work. It was there that I began to shape the character,” he said. “We are all depressed a lot of the time, and I was kind of depressed when I got the idea. Not when I was making the film,” he clarified. “Because then it would be a bad film.

Langlo attributed much of the film’s bone-dry humor to “Scandinavian melancholy,” and people seemed curious to hear an explanation of Jomar’s mental state in the film. No one could offer any easy answers. “He’s not sick,” Langlo said. “Maybe it’s the society? Well, that’s a long story. All the people he meets along the way are struggling more than him… maybe it’s better to struggle together.

And of course, everyone wanted to hear about the film’s mesmerizing, blazing white landscape. One audience member pointed out that the setting feels like another character in the film, something Langlo credits Øgaard with accomplishing. The “very expensive” shoot brought the crew 500 kilometers north of the arctic circle at one point, and small avalanches were a routine worry. A skier was lost in heavy fog during filming and came dangerously close to launching off a 50-meter drop. “The landscape is like an antagonist as well,” said Hovland.

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Winner: Best New Narrative Filmmaker.
As a result, this film will screen two additional times on
Sunday, May 3: 12:00 pm and 6:00 pm.
For tickets, click here.

Read more Festival Q&As.