This year, you can find several films closely linked with literature in the Film fra Sør programme. We have strengthened the ‘Literature and Film’ strand of the programme by moving several screenings to Litteraturhuset in downtown Oslo. There, we invite interesting guests to enrich our film experience through introductions, conversations and discussions.
One of the films we are proud to be able to present to our audience is Chang-dong Lee’s prize-winning masterwork Poetry. The film won the best original screenplay prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and was nominated to the Palme d’Or. The film also won the main prize at this year’s Tromsø International Film Festival. In Poetry we meet Mija, an elderly woman affected by Alzheimer and speech loss. She starts taking part in a local writing course and, through this discovery of traditional Korean poetry, she is forced to confront the brutal realities as well as all the beautiful things surrounding her.
Director Lee is himself a novelist. In the film it is easy to see how literature has served both as a cinematic enrichment and as a medium to add depth to the human drama unfolding in front of our eyes. Does literature hold the answers to the existential and moral problems Mija is faced with? We do not know. The audience is nevertheless guaranteed a rare movie experience with Poetry, a film that really manages to convey some of literature’s power and influence over us human beings.
One of the documentary films in this year’s literature programme gives a closer look to perhaps the most renowned author in Israel: Amos Oz. His name is mentioned every year in connection to the Nobel Prize in literature and he has won a series of prestigious international awards for his work. The documentary Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams gives us a unique insight in the connection between politics and literature, and is based on Oz’ autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002). Historic archive material from 1940s Jerusalem and Israel’s early past is elegantly combined with the author’s own readings from the novel.
The formative experiences the novel portrays gradually unfold in the course of the film, revealing Oz’ thoughts and opinions on writing, the Jewish identity, politics and his vision of a future peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians. This documentary truly comes up close and personal with the author, the man and the politically engaged Amos Oz.
Both with and without previous knowledge of Korean poetry, Israeli novels and other literature from the south, are guaranteed to find something appealing in this year’s ‘Literature and Film’ programme strand. Welcome to the festival!
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