Sister, What Grows Where Land Is Sick? (2022) User Reviews

Climate catastrophe and the psychosphere

[robinjaede · 7/10 · 27 December 2023]

A beautifully told coming of age drama that deals with the dread forced upon younger generations by climate catastrophy, the destruction of the planet and its nature.

Seen through the eyes of her younger sister we follow Veras detereorating mental health and her manyfold and ultimately doomed ways to cope with the screaming injustices of the modern world and the hopelessnes she faces in a late capitalist dystopia, be it through art or hedonistic escapism. Cleverly, the film uses a beautiful Norwegian scenery as backdrop for its themes about the destruction of nature and the inevitable decay of all life in a world obsessed with growth, without showing the destruction itself. Rather, we experience its inescapable omnipresence in the psychosphere, as to underline, that there is no periphery we as humans can escape to from what we have done to ourselves.

A shortfilm / art cinema that's just too long

[myicq-1 · 2/10 · 2 December 2023]

Part of the ARTE film festival 2023, a film you feel you just have to see because the selected films MUST be good.

Set in beautiful and rough norther Norway, in a barren and cold landscape, we follow two late teen sisters. The younger tells the story (the film plot according to description) about how she reads the diary of the older sister.

This could lead to many different plots, but this is where the film seems to lose the direction. The older sister has a diary full of glitter, drawings, clipouts, fairly dystopian and somehow desparate. But the scenes that follow in the next 1 hour or so are like a lot of 3-5 minute shorts set together, featuring the same sisters but totally out of context. We see the older sister in a tub telling about ripping open her skin. Next the two sisters may be somewhere on a street hitchhiking, followed by them taking a swim.

You really feel like you WANT to make sense of all this, but just can't make a story of it. And you feel in the end "maybe I'm just too stupid to understand such an intellectual movie". As in the old fairy tale of the emperor's new clothes.