Growth of the Soil

In rural Norway at the start of the twentieth century, Isak settles on barren ground. Together with his wife Inger and their two sons he makes a farm out of it. The work is heavy, the winters long, and everything gained is gained by hand. The film shows the life as both harsh and filling. It is adapted from the novel of the same name by Knut Hamsun, the book that won him the Nobel. Gunnar Sommerfeldt, who wrote the screenplay and directed, also played the bailiff Geissler himself. The nature of northern Norway holds a place of its own inside the account. Amund Rydland and Karen Poulsen appear in Sommerfeldt’s hundred and seven minute silent Norwegian film, completed in 1921.