Olden, Norway might not be a place you have ever heard of or know anything about but it is located in one of the most stunning and pristine natural settings on the planet. Situated at the mouth of the Oldeelva River and close to the Jostedal glacier, the largest inland glacier in Europe, the small village of less than 600 inhabitants is nonetheless a top travel destination for tourists who travel to Norway. It is also the childhood home of filmmaker Margreth Olin, who has made a film about it entitled Fedrelandet (English title: Songs of Earth, 2023) except it is no conventional documentary. Although it does showcase the awe-inspiring beauty of the region, it is much more intimate in scope since the emphasis is on Olin’s relationship with her parents and how growing up in Olden affected her feelings about nature and her place in the world.
Olden’s 84-year-old father, Jorgen Mykleen, and her slightly younger mother Magnhild, are occasionally featured on camera while Jorgen also serves as a narrator of sorts, providing some history about the village and his family. Most surprising of all, we learn that Jorgen had been born with his feet facing backwards, which was corrected with surgery at the age of two. Ever since that time, he became an avid hiker and he still displays a boundless energy as he scales rocky hillside trails and frozen tundra in the pursuit of the natural wonders surrounding Olden.
The documentary that became Songs of Earth was actually triggered by a traumatic event in the director’s life. Her partner suffered a stroke and it upended her life for five years, leaving her exhausted and uncertain about the future. It was during a visit to see her parents in Olden that the idea for the movie began to take shape. As Margreth recalled in an interview with Mehdi Balamissa for the Toronto International Film Festival, “It was an incredibly difficult time for me. My father’s response, as it often was, was, “We should go for a walk.” Walking was his answer to everything. He proposed that we walk for a year. We embarked on this journey in spring when life blooms anew, and each season unveiled its unique wonders….As I followed my father for a year, I began to see that, like his ancestors, he had left his mark on the nature he had traversed throughout his life. The notion of losing my parents transformed into a form of acceptance. During that year, my father’s response to my fear of the possibility of losing anything at any moment was that life is bigger than death because there will always be a new spring.”
Complimented by the extraordinary cinematography of Lars Erlend Tubaas Oymo, Songs of Earth takes us through the four seasons in Olden as we see bucolic images of wild flowers growing out of rocks, majestic overviews of fjords and mountain lakes, or a group of elk crossing a snow covered meadow. In one startling close-up we watch the face of a butterfly as a long, circular tongue emerges from its mouth and unfurls itself toward the camera like some bizarre species from another planet. In another scene, we observe Jorgen and Magnhild as they encounter numerous spectacular waterfalls caused by the melting glacier, one of the many realities facing Olden residents as global warming proves it is not a media hoax.
Yet the visual splendors of Songs of Earth are not served up in the interests of creating an ecological warning on the order of documentaries like Before the Flood (2016), An Inconvenient Truth (2006) or Koyaanisqatsi (1982), where the human race is responsible for creating environmental disasters around the globe. Director Olin was very specific about this, stating in an interview with Nobuhiro Hosoki of Cinema Daily.com: “There are a lot of sociopolitical films out there bringing facts to the table by scientists and politicians and activists and journalists. And those films are important, but they’re also scary for young people. By making a film about this topic, I wanted my contribution to be “why should we take care of nature?” Nature is our home. I wanted to give the audience an experience—a nature experience in the cinema, with images and sound—so you feel that you can reconnect with nature. That was my goal.”
With Songs of Earth (which was executive produced by Liv Ullmann and Wim Wenders), Olin succeeds in making a movie that is both a loving tribute to her parents but also an elegiac poem about the wonders of the natural world, which can be exhilarating as well as frightening (avalanches that occurred in Olden in years past wiped out entire families in one fell swoop yet the survivors returned to rebuild).
One of the most distinctive features of Olin’s documentary is the immersive sound design which blends together wind blowing through a cavern, massive chunks of glacier ice collapsing into a lake, the cry of birds or the buzzing of bees into a natural symphony. Working with sound designer Tormod Ringnes, Olin shared such unique field recordings as microphones capturing the sounds inside glacier crevasses with her musical composer Rebekka Karijord, who then transcribed these recordings into orchestral sounds. “She then took these early scores to the studio and recorded soloists,” Olin noted in an interview on the Classic Couple Academy website. “She sent these recordings back to me and my brilliant editor Michal Leszczylowski and, parallel with the editing, Tormod started to integrate the music with the sound design…I wanted the powerful (nature) to breathe throughout the film. At the end, we took the sketches and sounds and Rebekka orchestrated them for London Contemporary Orchestra, whom we then recorded the score at AIR studio in London. The end result is a mix between those first raw sketches from the very beginning, and the larger orchestral recordings.”
All of Olin’s hard work paid off in the end because Songs of Earth has gone on to garner numerous awards at such high profile events as the Krakow Film Festival (nominee for Best International Documentary), Denver Film Festival (Best Documentary nominee) and Palm Springs International Film Festival (Best Foreign Language Film). It was also Norway’s official Oscar entry for Best International Film for 2024 although it didn’t make the short list (Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took home the Academy Award that year).
Songs of Earth has also been critically acclaimed by many prominent critics such as Daniel Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter, who made this astute observation about the movie: “Songs of Earth is not a small movie. It’s a documentary that should be seen on the biggest screen at your disposal — whatever showcases its epic cinematography to its best advantage. Don’t sell Songs of Earth short, mind you, as an exclusively visual experience. Its sound design and score are every bit as immersive, and that may hold the actual key to best experiencing Olin’s film. Not everybody, or most people even, will get to experience Songs of Earth in a festival setting. But once the documentary makes its way to PBS or Netflix or whatever streamer acquires it, the more you’re able to shut off external stimuli, the more you’ll be able to let Olin’s film wash over you and the less you’ll be inclined to let your mind wander.”
Director Olin has been making films since 1997 when she wrote and directed Onkel Reider, a documentary short. Most of her work has been in the non-fiction genre although she did helm a dramatic feature in 2009 – Engelen (English title: The Angel), in which a heroin addict confronts the reality of caring for her newborn daughter. Among her more critically acclaimed work is Raw Youth (2006), a portrait of a high school in Oslo, Nowhere Home (2012), which focuses on immigration in Norway, and The Self Portrait (2020), which recounts the life of artist Lene Marie Fossen and her battle with anorexia.
Currently you can stream Songs of Earth on Kanopy and other streaming platforms but for those who prefer an analog copy, you can purchase a DVD of the documentary (released by Strand Home Video in August 2024) from online sellers. There are no extras on the disc.
Other links of interest:
https://www.norwegianamerican.com/songs-of-earth-fedrelandet/
https://www.margretholin.com/songsofearth
https://chickeneggfilms.org/filmmakers-and-films/filmmaker/margreth-olin
Cinema Sojourns 