Joseph Fahim at Sight and Sound:
“These days, I rarely think about her. And when I do, it’s happy thoughts. Because it was so nice. Very painful, but mostly wonderful. That’s why I wrote it down. To keep it with me. I know I will never forget it, but memories change. I thought if I found the right words to describe it exactly as it was, I could capture it, make it solid. Something I could hold in the palm of my hand forever.”
For high-schooler Johanne (Ella Øverbye), the motivation for writing a novel about her hazy affair with her French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) might be more complex and less obvious than her poetical declaration suggests. Her version of events – framed in misty, dream-like sequences resembling shards of her fragmented memory – is part burning recollections, part fabrication and part wish-fulfilment. Her factual reliability as a narrator is always in question, but it doesn’t matter, since the authenticity and truthfulness of what she felt over the course of that tumultuous and formative year is what matters to herself, to her mother and grandmother, to her readers and to us, the viewers.
more here.
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