Summary
Telemark’s emerald valleys cradle two farms—one fat with acres, the other lean yet melodious—where a prodigal heir, all freckle and fervor, aches to trade the clatter of silver spoons for the silvered sigh of a Hardanger fiddle. Across the meadow, the neighbor’s boy coaxes from gut and pine a music that turns sheep-strewn hills into cathedrals, and every bowstroke feels to the rich lad like a rune from a brighter cosmos. Father, a slab of patriarchal granite, loathes the scrape of strings; land, he thunders, is the only ledger that matters. One dawn, the paternal silhouette is found prone beneath an ancient ash, throat opened by an unseen hand, and suddenly the farm’s inheritance hangs like a storm cloud over the boy’s rosin-dusted fingertips. What follows is not a whodunit but a slow-motion fracture: the protagonist’s dream boomerangs into nightmare, the village’s Lutheran piety curdles into whispered psalms of guilt, and the fiddle’s voice—once a passport to ecstasy—becomes the very echo of patricidal possibility. Shot in 1920 on nitrate that seems to inhale the very spruce-scented air, the film lets glacier light carve guilt into every face, until the final reel blooms with a dance on the barn’s splintered boards where the living and the dead share a single, shuddering bow.
Synopsis
In the most beautiful Telemark a young boy grown up on a rich farm wanting to be a fiddle player like the son at the poorer neighboring farm, to his father's dislike. One day the father is found dead.
Director
Cast
