On the Danish Wadden Island of Mandø, which has fewer than thirty residents, it seems you only have to take your camera out of its case to shoot beautiful images. The mudflats in their countless shades of brown and grey; the water in which endless skies are reflected; the birds which also provide the film’s soundtrack together with the ever-blowing wind.
Yet the island has emptied of its occupants as the floods have come in. It has a history of struggle against the water; somewhere under the mud lies buried an entire village that was swallowed up in the seventeenth century.
The story of Mandø, which enjoys preservation status due to its unique bird population (and attendant streams of visitors), is told from the perspective of Gregers, who, along with his mother, works as the last livestock farmer on the island. The camera follows the blushing, blond man, always accompanied by his faithful dog and his cigarette, throughout the course of many days, around the island, in his room packed with stuffed animals and clutter, and in his conversations with his mother (his father does little more than look on puzzled eyes) and a close friend.
Gregers is a wonderful, tragic protagonist whose history is told in a subtle and highly distinctive way. In the car he listens to the radio programme Farmer Seeks Love, for which he has signed up. He gets a call about his possible participation and is what he has to offer women. Gregers gets no further than a stammering: “um … nature…”
His attempts to find love in this way run like a thread through the film and provide a tragicomic note. Another motif is the moon, filmed in different phases from an elegant crescent to a menacing full sphere, almost bursting at the seams. As the moon waxes and wanes, so the tides and the waters change, disturbing ever more urgently the poorly maintained dikes.
We learn more and more about Gregers through the arrival of his son, who lives on the mainland with his mother, and through archival video showing him in a television broadcast as a teenager with shining eyes and a dream to fly like a bird – certainly not to become a farmer.
In addition to Gregers, the film features a number of other iconic characters on the island, who are introduced as the farmer drives past buildings on an absurdist tour, in a techno-sounding tractor with an overweight bale of hay. A house displaying flags contains Mie, who is being sung to on her 99th birthday. The tractor also races past the only store, where the owner and a customer have a conversation about the effects of the moon.
The film is full of wonderful, human, slightly absurdist observations – the remote bingo, where the numbers come into the living room via a radio transmitter; Gregers picking a chicken in the barn in front of a dead fox; the bird spotter walking through a field where resides a stalled tank.
The film is an ode to this tough community and its tenacious residents. It shows these people’s love for a nature that gives them what they need, but also takes from them what they don’t want to lose. It captures everything in outstanding cinematography and ties it all together in sublime editing. And although there is plenty to smile about, the movie never takes advantages of its protagonists, who are captured with the same love and respect they have for each other, and their disappearing island.
Juan Palacios, Denmark, 2023, 89 min
Director: Juan Palacios
Co-director: Sofie Husum Johannesen
Production: Kasper Lykke Schultz for Elk Film
Executive producer: Andreas Dalsgaard for Elk Film
Cinematography: Juan Palacios
Editor: Nicolas Nørgaard Staffolani
Sound Design: Peter Albrechtsen
Music: Morten Svenstrup
Involved TV Channel: TV 2 Denmark
World Sales: Lightdox
Screening copy: Danish Film Institute
This review was first published during IDFA 2023.
