The Robin Menken Reviews

SFFLA, 2024 (The Scandinavian Film Festival LA with BalticFilmExpo@SFFLA)

 

Some of my favorite films at SFFLA 2024

 

TITINA- Award-winning animation writer/director Kajsa Næss's first feature “Titina” is an adult feature animation, based on the almost true facts of the first and second expedition to The North Pole by a lighter than air ship.

 

The charming animation, containing archival footage mixed with flat animation is a Belgian/Norwegian co-production.

 

The film is told in flashback, beginning in

Roma, 1978. An elderly pooch, Titina, lives with her grandfatherly owner, Umberto Nobile.

 

Discovering an old film can with reels of films, Nobile threads up his projector and the two lifelong companions sit down to watch their lauded history. Shown in newsreel archival footage from 1926 we see handsome aviator Umberto Nobile and frisky Titina aboard a giant Zeppelin.

 

(A dog who survives five decades is one of the fantasy elements woven through the film including canine visions of Avian musicals and an ominous cookbook with a recipe for “terrier stew.”)

 

They remember their first meeting. After a canine-human meet cute, adorable terrier stray Titina follows Nobile home. He adopts her to the joy of his young daughter Maria.

 

Turns out Nobile is a renowned airship pilot and designer.

 

In Norway, Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian explorer who led the first expedition to the South Pole, decides to lead an expedition to the inaccessible North Pole. He decides to try by Zeppelin and phones Nobile to commission a ship that must withstand the most demanding arctic weather conditions. 

 

He also wants Nobile’s Italian team to fly the expedition to the North Pole and Alaska. Nobile jumps at the chance.

 

When Nobile arrives in Norway, he brings Titina along. 

 

At first all goes well between up and coming designer/ aviator Nobile and his idol, the older skier/explorer 

Amundsen. They respect each other but as the expedition progresses Nobile begins to feel pushed to the sidelines and tensions and competitions begin to fester.

 

After their successful landmark flight, Amundsen and Nobile launch an angry public argument in the leading newspapers of the day over who deserved the credit and glory.

 

Written out of history and insulted publicly by Amundsen, infuriated Nobile flies back to the North Pole with Titina and his own crew on his second Zeppelin- the ill-fated Italia, but crash lands, leading to a complicated search and rescue. Amundsen took part in the rescue mission, but died attempting to land and rescue what turned out to be frozen members of the Italia Crew. Nobile survived.

 

Animation (animation director Abhijeet Bambardekar ) and Art Direction (Emma McCann) capture alluring arctic lands and skies. Character design (lead character designer Siri Dokken) creates an indelible pair of protagonists.

 

After a story of male competItion, which ultimately proves fatal,  Kajsa Næss’ heart warming final sequence and Titina's end credit song, about shared cooperatio , send the audience out feeling hopeful.

 

Satiric versions of Mussolini and the Pope Pius XI seemed a bit discordant.

 

Amundson, a key figure of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, began his stellar career as first mate on Adrien de Gerlache's Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899. From 1903 to 1906, he led the first expedition to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage on the sloop Gjøa. In 1909, Amundsen began planning for a South Pole expedition. He reached Antarctica in January 1911. His party established a camp at the Bay of Whales and supply depots on the Barrier (the Ross Ice Shelf) Traveling over icy land, the party of five, led by Amundsen, became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911.

Amundsen disappeared in June 1928 while flying on a rescue mission for the airship Italia in the Arctic.

 

In truth the Nobile-Amundsen team never landed on the Pole but dropped the flags, and, according to researchers, the Italian flag was bigger.

 

After the crash of the Italia, it seemed as if the whole world was traveling to the North Pole on a desperate rescue mission: Norwegian ships, three arctic icebreakers from the Soviet Union set sail. Norway, Finland, Sweden and Italy sent planes. One of Sweden’s Fokkers, piloted by the officer Lundborg, landed at the camp of the survivors and informed the crew that he only had room for Nobile and his dog.

 

Nobile accepted, leaving the crew to be rescued later, 

but the decision to take his dog over his crew destroyed Nobile’s reputation. Condemned as a commander who left his men, he was persecuted for the next fifty years, until his death. Half of the 16 crew members of the airship Italia survived, plus Nobile’s dog Titina.

 

Lovable explorer Titina remained in the limelight for years after, and was welcomed to the White House by the US president. She was so famous she hung with Rudolph Valentino, had photo shoots with the royal family of Norway, and even met the Mayor of New York .

 

"These events were previously adapted into the 1969 film “The Red Tent”, an Italian/Soviet co-production, featuring Peter Finch as Nobile, Sean Connery as Amundsen."

 

DRIVING MUM-Hilmar Oddsson’s seventh feature is a wry, darkly poetic post-mortem road movie.

 

Iceland, circa 1980. Dour fifty-something Jon (Þröstur Leó Gunnarsson) lives with his mother (Kristbjörg Kjeld) in the most remote fjords of Northwestern Iceland, served by a weekly small boat. To survive, they knit traditional sweaters, which they send to the mainland via the weekly boat delivering their staples and tape recordings of radio shows. Their only entertainment are these random tapes, which cut off in the middle of songs or reports.

 

Jon’s domineering mother chose to live in isolation as penance for a life of bad decisions. Jon lives there because mum says so.

 

The taciturn pair communicate over knitting.

 

Dictatorial Mum, who worries about Jon’s well-being after she’s gone, asks for two things: she wants to visit Gulfoss and Geyser and have her picture taken, and she wants to return to her Southern home town of Eyrarbakki - to be buried, NOT cremated. She dies.

 

Obedient Jon sits his well-dressed dead mother in the back seat and sets off accompanied by their loyal dog Brezhnev. The two, who apparently rarely spoke when Mum was alive, are now nattering away. Mostly Mum nags.

 

As is expected in a Picaresque, they encounter a series of eccentric characters, none of whom believe that Mum is dead. They just assume Jon’s making a joke

 

Perhaps sharing a car with his dead mother takes him across the divide, as they encounter other ghosts, or people ready to transition, on the road, including sickly French hitchhiker Tomas (French Icelandic albino actor Tomas Lemarquis). With atrophied social skills Jon treats

everyone rudely.

 

The ghost of Jon’s great love, beautiful Bergdis (Hera Hilmar) joins them. Mum never liked Bergdis and her chatty corpse makes that clear. When Bergdis vanishes, Jon detours to visit her home, where he confuses her look-alike daughter with his previous love.

 

Jon’s one hobby is taking pictures of empty landscapes. Along the road, his pictures begin to feature people, illustrating his psychological thawing. 

 

They encounter a theatrical dance company whose mysterious dance number, along with a scene in a karaoke bar, add to the melancholy film's oddly exhilarating atmosphere.

 

Besides the theatre company, they encounter a farmer, and a birthday girl who shows interest in Jon. These chance encounters awaken memories of Jons youthful more sociable self, but its too little too late. Jon’s one truly spontaneous act is to ‘cremate’ mum, setting the car on fire in an act of revenge.

 

Jon is charged with ‘murdering' his mom. Characters they ran across, like the farmer, testify that Mum was alive and talking in the car. 

 

Attached to his mother, Jon lived a life “in captivity”.

His prison sentence is a psychology comforting “homecoming.”

 

The journey is an illustration of a road not taken until the very last minute, Oddsson’s meditation on Jon’s stoic 

resignation finds an ironic solution to a man’s inability to be free.

 

DOP Óttar Guðnason’s expressive black and white photography captures Iceland’s moody fogbound weather and beauteous, sparsely populated landscape.

 

Driving Mum won the Grand Prix in the Official Selection Competition in Tallinn, 2023 and was also an Industry Select title at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival 

 

THE RIOT- Niels Gaup's “The Riot” (AKA “Sulis 1907”) is a strong historical drama telling the story of the landmark miner’s strike in Sulitjelma (Sulis) at the beginning of the 20th century which led to the Union and Main Agreement of 1935, which became the model for Norwegian and eventually the Nordic Welfare state, (and multi-level collective bargaining, based on the economic foundations of social corporatism.)

 

Niels Gaup is a Sámi film director from Norway.

In 1987 Gaup wrote The Pathfinder, the first screenplay in the Sámi language, which was Norway's 1988 Oscar Submission.

 

Tiny 10-year-old Swede Konrad Nilsson (Bror-Erik Persson) is sold in a Norwegian market because his mother cannot provide for him. A “slave - child”, he and  his labor, is now owned by a powerful farmer in Nordland.

 

At first he works at the farm for room and board. He’s promised a salary when he is of age, but unable to wait till he is 21, Konrad (Otto Fahlgren) runs away. He windz up in Sulis, home of one of the largest copper mines in Norway’s Wild West mining district. 

 

Konrad takes a job as a miner in the dangerous Hanken mine, at first as an apprentice with scant pay. 

 

When hard working Konrad asks for an adult living wage the foreman turns him down. But American Swede Olof Wenström (Simon J. Berger) takes a shine to his fellow Swede and promotes him. He seduces Konrad with meals and the promise of an eventual ticket to America if he will be his eyes and ears on the ground.

 

The grizzled miners mock the wiry youth but eventually adopt him as one of theirs. Rasmus (Rune Temte) is the stubborn veteran miner who leads the men towards a union. He was eager to play the role, as his grandfather worked lighting fuses in the mines.

 

Johanna (Pernille Sandøy) plays a house maid who spies on the mine owners at the big house. She and Konrad become a pair.

 

The mining companies hold the power of life and death over the miners.  Hanken, the mine with the hardest working miners and highest yield is the worst of the worst, especially once Wenström imports dangerous American mining practices.

 

Wenström studied mining methods in the U.S. and is determined to increase profits.

 

His first game changer is to order the vet miners to blast away the pillars, freeing up visible ore.

 

Although it’s illegal in Norway to remove the support pillars, Wenström proceeds, using private police to force the miners to bend to his will. This act of hubris leads to  tragedies down the line.

 

Union organizer Helene Ugland (Alexandra Gjerpen) arrives to lead a meeting, Arrested by mining company police, she is exiled from the region, and hides out, ironically, at the farm Konrad fled.

 

Production values are perfection. Gaup is an adept world builder, and we are engrossed in his various claustrophobic communities. DOP Anders Bohman starts the film in “black and white” and the rest of the color film is a subtle variant of almost black and white.

Michael Higgins’s production design, Rudolfs Baltins’s 

art direction and Baiba Litina’s costume design are subtle and powerful. Roy Westad’s score mixes orchestral and some modern or traditional music.

 

(Actually it was a Sami, Mons Petter, who first found the ore in Sulitjelma in 1858 . He thought he had found gold.)

 

The Swedish mining company, which built an entire community from scratch in the early 1890s, owned and ruled it with wide powers. “ All who will not work should starve”, he Swedish director famously said. The central management was in Helsingborg in Sweden, and the local management was in Sulitjelma.

 

The mining company developed into the country's second largest workplace after Borregaard, with 1,750 workers around 1910.

 

As is typical in many historic films, characters have been conflated or imagined. Union organizer Helene Ugland was in Sultijelma and was a key figure in inspiring the workers to demand an agreement.  Hanken Mine's cook, Svarta Bjørn, is another legendary character. Wenström was actually replaced by Emil Knudsen during the climatic events shown in the film.

 

In truth the historic union meeting was held on the frozen lake of Langvatnet, the only place in town not owned by the mining company. It is shown under the final credits. Over 1,200 workers organized for better pay and working conditions and schooling for the children. The co-operative was allowed to open a shop, a vocational school and establish a public library