“I have known for years that I am going to make a film about nature,” says Norwegian director Margreth Olin. For a long time she has wanted to address what she terms “the big issue of our time,” the climate crisis and the preservation of the environment. But her approach to the task was always going to be particular, and very gentle. She had no wish to, as she puts it, “put more fear or flames into what’s concerning all of us.”
Rather, in Songs of Earth, exec-produced by Wim Wenders and Liv Ullmann, sold by Cinephil and world-premiering at CPH:DOX, Olin presents a view of nature with a distinctly personal undertow, returning to the place where she grew up. Oldedalen, in western Norway, is a tiny village resting beside both a magnificent fjord and Europe’s largest inland glacier. What’s more, the story she tells is teeming with the love she feels for her parents, and especially her father.
Father Jørgen is 84 and bright as a button. When he was born his feet were facing the wrong way, he tells in the film, and so for two years they had to be slowly turned around and straightened. Eventually, on his second birthday he came home from hospital with two perfect feet. “They haven’t stopped walking since,” he says.
While Olin’s mother Magnhild would tell her fairytales when she was a small girl, her father would take her to the great Norwegian outdoors. “He would say, ‘let’s go for a walk, because the fairytale is out there.’” When Olin first encountered the blue ice glacier caves she was convinced that the musical tones she could hear when the wind blew into cave openings were from an orchestra inside. “My father, he was feeding my imagination. And my love for nature and animals has always been very present for me,” she says.
Olin explains the course of events which set her new film in motion. Seven years ago her partner suffered a major stroke. He was two years older than her and ostensibly fit, being a keen footballer and marathon runner. Doctors told her to expect the worst, but against all the odds he survived. That said, when he recovered, he seemed a completely different person and their relationship became one more akin to “brother and sister.”
“It was so hard for me, and it took me years to accept that this had happened to us. There’s no way that you can prepare for something like that,” she says. At the same time the director’s daughter also became critically ill.
“I have this urgency and need to tell stories, but at that point, the flame was not there anymore,” Olin tells of her mental state at the time. “I lost confidence in life… And then I went to my father and said that I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live my life anymore. Then he said, ‘let’s go for a walk, but this time let’s walk for one year. I think that the answers that you are looking for, we will find them on our walk.’”
Olin asked if she could record their process of walking with her dad over the subsequent year, with a small crew in tow, a suggestion that he happily agreed to. The result for Olin was profound. “When you walk in rough terrain and high in the mountains, you have to play close attention to where you put your foot. Every step you take is important. So my past and my future left me, and I had to be present here and now. [Then] we came to autumn and the leaves fade and the colours fade, and death is a part of life. But after death, there is still life. So life is bigger than death. So my fear left me,” she expresses.
During that year she recorded the passing of the seasons with all the dramatic changes within the flora and fauna. She also listened to her kind and gentle dad, “the rock of the family,” as her mother refers to him, as he explained the history of his family and the land where he grew up. We hear of the planting of what has become the magnificent Pasture Spruce by Olin’s great grandfather (a tree which still stands vast and proud); the ebb and flow of the glacier over the years, and the two great landslides of 1905 and 1936 which killed large numbers of Olin’s forebears. Also the long history of happy marriages within the family, and acts of both bravery and kindness by villagers, such as when the young Jörgen, who had developed acute appendicitis, had to be carried across the enormous Sandriker snowdrift by six men in a storm, an endeavor which took nine hours.
These stories are accompanied by mesmerizing and curious camerawork straight out of the BBC Natural History mould. Animals, insects and plants are presented in their full beauty (and detail), as are the minutae of ice formations or the mirror surfaces of the fjord. We even see Jørgen’s all-listening ear in extreme close-up.
“What I learned is the importance of roots, and I learned that Nature is our hope,” Olin reflects. “Of course, the beauty and dangers of nature and the dramatic scenery that I grew up with, it’s always been there. But I haven’t experienced what he [her father] has experienced through his life. Because in my life I have been [going] to different countries. I want to travel a lot. I want to meet new people. But my father, he wants to be in nature and he wants to stay at home, but not in his house, but outside in these beautiful surroundings.”
Olin adds how, years ago, she began to practise transcendental meditation, but that her dad can immerse into the self at any time in the countryside. “He sits there and he’s filled with light and colours and beauty. And his physical and psychological health comes from this,” she says.
The film’s music, scored by Rebekka Karijord, is performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra and derives from the sounds within the crevasses of the glacier. “We invited soloists of different instruments to transform the sounds of nature into man-made music. And then Rebekka, my composer, wrote the notes,” says Olin.
Before the film’s general release in Norway in September, Olin will arrange free outside screenings at “10 of the most beautiful sceneries in Norway. The headline will be ‘Norwegian Nature is Free for Everyone.’ No-one has to purchase tickets and we will encourage people to bring their sleeping bag to sleep outside under the stars,” she says.
Olin reflects again on the enormity of her project, not only in environmental terms, but psychologically as well. “When making this film, of course I had to go inside the ice [cave]. And I did. And that is one of the most beautiful experiences, the planets and galaxies that are frozen in time, thousands of years ago. And I thought that if this is going to be my grave, it’s okay, because I haven’t seen anything as beautiful as this, having my father by my side and sharing this with him.”
“I think now when I see the film that in one way I am preparing for saying goodbye,” Olin further notes. “The traces of my father, the paths we have walked are shaped by our ancestors. But I see that my father’s footprints stay behind as well. He will always be there as a part of this landscape for me.”
