The song of the earth. The review

An immersive experience which, through the sounds and majestic images of nature, guides us on an intimate and universal walk between past and present. In theaters from today.

The man of modern societies has always manifested in certain moments of his life or in some historical periods the need to return to real contact with nature, which would restore the deepest meaning of existence precisely by virtue of an atavistic relationship of osmosis : giving and receiving or vice versa taking and losing, where it is never an equal exchange but a balance that irremediably tips in our favor. Following the cycle of the seasons, with a prologue and an epilogue destined to repeat themselves, in the past and in the future, Olin tells the story of his family; in reality that of many others like his who have had several generations behind them and who try to transmit models and values ​​from which to draw so as not to feel abandoned when the people closest to them are lost. He thus returns to the Oldedalen valley, in the western part of Norway, where his parents live; he spends a year with them and chooses his father, 84 years old, as the main guide of this intimate and universal walk that crosses mountains, paths, woods, waterways, panoramas and horizons that reveal all their time, almost infinite compared to the brevity of our stay on earth.

The documentary, with often very long shots, pours all the majesty of nature onto the viewer; man is a very small part of it and the dialogues, measured, leave complete space for sounds and silences: a fire that crackles, water that bubbles, the earth that settles with its dull movements, a glacier that landslides slowly changing its own shape, to remind us of the effects of man’s action. It is an immersive sensory experience that invites you to listen. Family memories alternate with moments of absolute contemplation. The pace of the narrative is dictated by the environment itself with its fauna that merges with man to the point of overlapping: an ear becomes a basin of water, the wrinkled skin evokes the striations of the ground, marking the common origin of everything. Mother and daughter enter the scene from time to time, each next to her husband, like connecting links between past and present; the other only with her voice, singing childhood nursery rhymes. The documentary exudes spirituality, a philosophy of self-rediscovery and simple things which perhaps not surprisingly seems to be the reflection of one of Wenders’ many films (who is executive producer here together with Liv Ullmann), with that rituality of everyday life which perpetuates a gesture – the father planting a tree like his grandfather did 130 years earlier – trespassing on the sacred, in future memory of generations to come.

International title: Fedrelandet/Songs of Earth
Director: Margreth Olin
Cast: Margreth Olin, Jørgen Mykløen, Magnhild Mykløen
Distribution: Wanted Cinema
Duration: 90′
Origin: Norway, 2023