The Angel

Lea grows up in a small house at the edge of the forest; after her father dies her fragile mother Madelene takes up with Ole, who is jealous and drinks, and the air of the house changes. Years later Lea appears as a woman dependent on drugs, and she has a child; the film follows her caught between motherhood and dependency and her effort to win back her self respect. The account moves between the present and the past to show how such a life was built. In Margreth Olin’s ninety seven minute Norwegian film, Maria Bonnevie plays Lea, with Antti Reini and Lena Endre in the cast. The director wrote it starting from a young woman with a dependency whom she met in 1999, but deliberately moved the story away from that person’s life. It was completed in 2009 and is the film Norway submitted for the foreign language film Oscar.