Mikala Krogh: Everything is Relative

Surprise me, please, it is often said to filmmakers when films are to be thought of, written, pitched, filmed and put together. Nothing is worse, or more boring, than the predictability in narration where you know where it goes, from the very beginning.

Mikala Krogh surprises the viewer. She has chosen an unconventional chaptered structure with captions like ”love”, ”illness”, ”happiness”, ”time”, ”loss” and ”light” – and conveys these themes through the introduction of characters and small actions from all over the world. She puts them one after the other and cuts the geographical context. From (to take an example, under ”time”, one of the best performed chapters) a man from BanglaDesh who works in Dubai far away from family, to an old Danish woman who takes long time to button her sweater, back to Dubai skyline where cows slowly pass by on the ground, to a waiting room in a welfare society (pure Roy Andersson set-up), to a long emotionally impressive queu of Asian workers who line up to be ordered to get into a train, to American soldiers who receive orders, to a sequence of clocks and watches caught on a white background, to the Danish young woman who has cancer, and to Mogens Rukov, co-scenarist of the film, who reflect on time.

It is sometimes very cleverly constructed, yet with different tension in the individual scenes which have to be strong on their own as there is no story in a normal way. I like the abstract arrangement of people on a white background in a studio – it reminds me of early films by Danish documentarian Jørgen Leth – and I like the intentional hybrid form that Mikala Krogh uses in her reflection on the universality of love and happiness, illness and sorrow. The question is of course if this is a reasonable and relevant way of comparing or if it is a kaleidoscopic banality.

Judge for yourself, the film will come to a festival near you, for instance to Karlovy Vary beginning of July.

Denmark, 2008, 73 mins.

http://www.dfi.dk/english/Danish+films/ShortByDanishTitle/filmFact.htm?FilmID=18394

http://web.docuinter.net/en/net_archive.php?id=413

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