5 Questions for Margreth Olin

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(c) Agnete Brun

VERDICT: Nine cinematographers worked on depicting the landscape of glaciers and fjords that shaped director Margreth Olin's childhood in Norway.

“Making this film is all about listening in,” director Margreth Olin tells The Film Verdict in this moving interview. “To Earth herself and to my parents.” In her documentary Songs of Earth, Norway’s submission to the International Feature competition at the 2024 Oscars, Olin describes the awe-inspiring landscapes of her childhood as a formative influence on her life and her parents’.

 

The Film Verdict:  After making several features and shorts elsewhere, what made you finally decide to return to the place you grew up and make a film there?

 Margreth Olin: I have known since I started to make films that one day I’d return to western Norway to make a film about the landscapes of home; not only the wild and majestic mountains, the wonders of Europe`s largest inland glacier, our green lake and the enormous waterfalls, but also the inner landscapes of my parents. I believe that the natural world surrounding us when growing up is decisive for who we become. One of the biggest issues of our time is how to preserve nature. There are a lot of films out there about the climate and nature crises, bringing facts to the table by scientists, activists, politicians. This is crucial of course. My angel is different. Songs of Earth is a film about why we should take care of nature. Nature is our home. My access is through the family farm and the valley Oldedalen, where our ancestors have been living in balance with nature for generations – to survive. It had to be a film about belonging. We are nature, and nature is us. Following in my father´s footsteps for one year is also a way to accept our place in nature; our lifespan is quite small compared to the lifespan of the Earth. On a deeper level, it was me preparing for the day I will lose my parents. Making this film has made me understand the marks they leave behind.

The Film Verdict:  Songs of Earth is not a traditional documentary, but rather a visual-sonic reflection on a place and the people (in this case, your own parents) who live there. Why did you choose a more experimental approach to such a subject?

 Margreth Olin: When I was six years old my father took me to the glacier for the first time and we sat in front of it, looking into a portal of blue ice. Then the wind came through the valley. When the wind hit the surface of the ice and descended into its crevasses, the sound turned into tones; it sounded like music. I asked my father, “Is there an orchestra playing down there in the depths?” And he answered, “Can you hear them too?” All my life I have been wondering if all man-made music is inspired by the songs of the earth. I wanted to make a documentary symphony. Can the primordial forces that have shaped our fjords and landscape be heard? We lowered microphones down into the depths of the glacier and found a rhythm sounding like a clock ticking. We collected sounds underneath the surface of the lake and in the rivers and we found songs, as if the valley was breathing, and of course it is. In the natural world everything is alive. I wanted to make a love letter to nature, collecting all the gifts we have been given. Spring is like my father´s childhood, all is new-born; summer´s abundance is his youth; autumn with all its sudden shifts his adult life, and winter is the quiet and ease of his old age. Making this film is all about listening in. To Earth herself and to my parents. To their love for the outdoor life, and their love for each other.

The Film Verdict:  How did you make Songs of Earth look so epic on such a small budget? What kind of filmmaking techniques did you harness for that?

 Margreth Olin: Nine cinematographers worked on this film. My DOP Lars Erlend Tubass Oymo and my drone photographer Herman Lersveen are both very talented. Together we collected these images — we did not create them, we collected them. What is it to capture the soul of a place? What is it to see beyond the surface and transform the feeling you get meeting the power, the light, the colors of the seasons and the beauty of it all? We spent time there. Hours filming the mist dancing. Tracking my father climbing the mountains. From macro shots, filming insects in extreme close-up, then shooting the great wild panoramas from helicopters. A diver filmed under water. We worked intuitively, trusted my father and our surroundings. Dad was the one to decide which mountain we should hike. He was our guide. He knows the area like the inside of his pocket. It was like he was showing us the inside of himself, taking us to his favorites spots. For me it was like, these trees, these rocks, this spruce — this is what has formed the character of my father and his parents, who he loved so much.

We had three professional wild-life photographers filming eagles, ravens, game. They spent their life outdoors to capture the wild. Their contribution to our film is crucial. The birds in the film witness my father passing through life, too.

Making a film is more about transforming experience and feeling to sound, music and images than having a big budget. But of course I would have loved to have more time with the London Contemporary Orchestra. Rebekka Karijord´s score is in itself epic, and being in Air Studio in London when LCO performed and played the songs of the valley was like listening to the wind in the glacier as a child.  Also my editor and my sound designer are, in their own way, great artists. This film is all about rhythm. The first film of my editor Michal Lezczylowski was The Sacrifice by Andrej Tarkowski. I could not have made this film without him. An editor has to listen to the material and take care of what it communicates. We worked closely with sound designer Tormod Ringnes during the editing. Every piece of music evolves and grows out of the nature sounds.

The Film Verdict:  The film was shot over several seasons under different weather conditions — snow, ice, rain, thaw. What was the most difficult part to make?

 Margreth Olin: Honestly, it was not difficult. For Norwegians, winter, wind and rain are more common than a warm, sunny day. Of course it took a lot of planning and taking the weather into account all the time. It can really be dangerous not to, so every hike we did in the mountains and on the glacier was prepared by talking to locals and the institute of meteorology several days in advance. If the weather suddenly changed we rescheduled, and if we were in the mountains and Dad said we had to go down, we did. We had glacier guides with us and the safety of the crew was carefully taken into consideration. The most adventurous thing we did was to crawl under the glacier, into a blue ice-cave in the middle of the winter. To do that we had to go skiing a couple of hours mid-winter over terrain where there are avalanches, so picking the right day to go was important. Being inside the glacier for hours made my heart and mind stop. It was the most beautiful experience of my life. Seeing the shapes of planets and galaxies frozen in time thousands of years ago.

The Film Verdict:  At the end of Songs of Earth, you hint at the melting glaciers in the Oldedalen valley. Has the area changed greatly since your childhood because of environmental issues?

 Margreth Olin: Nature as we know it is changing also in my father´s valley, and in the whole area. The beautiful glacier branches have withdrawn 800 meters in the last 25 years: the glacier is melting. My father says in the film that we should listen to nature and the stories she tells.