The Rules for Everything

Storm is ten years old. Her father disappears and her mother begins making instructional videos with an Eastern European self help guru. Storm has to decide for herself which rules to live by so that the world will not fall apart. The film takes the child’s logic seriously; inventing rules is not a game for her but a way of staying upright. The account does not make fools of the adults, but shows that they too are looking for the answer in someone else’s rules. What became of the missing father is not explained, and that gap is left on purpose. Its construction in chapters and its narrating voice give the film the tone of a tale. Tindra Hillestad Pack plays the lead in Kim Hiorthoy’s eighty seven minute Norwegian film, completed in 2017.