Songs of Earth

Margreth Olin's 2023 Norwegian documentary follows a valley with the director's eighty-five-year-old father as guide. He was born there and generations before him lived there; the film follows him across four seasons. Sound is at the centre. The cracking of the glacier, water under snow, wind and the sound of walking were each recorded separately; the song of the title is not figurative but the thing recorded. Olin is filming her own family, and that separates it from a nature documentary. The father's age and his increasing difficulty in walking stay visible throughout; landscape and a lifetime are shown at the same scale. Who it's for: those who like nature documentary and quiet observational cinema. Who it's not for: viewers expecting an informative nature film; it explains nothing and the pace is very slow.