The Eden Cinemas Side Street Films initiative has so far brought an eclectic list of titles from around the world to Maltese audiences, from Danish director Lars Von Trier’s controversial two-parter The Nymphomaniac to the thoughtful family drama The Past from France and India’s quirky The Lunchbox.
Side Street Films is currently showing The Quiet Roar, a dark drama from Sweden in which Evabritt Strandberg stars as Marianne, a 68-year-old woman diagnosed with a terminal disease.
Riddled with anxiety over her impending death, she seeks therapy at a clinic where she is treated with psilocybin (LSD) and meditation by a counsellor, Eva (Hanna Schygulla).
Through this, Marianne is transferred to her subconscious, where she travels back in time to a family holiday in an idyllic spot within the Norwegian fjords and mountains.
There she meets and confronts her 25-year old self and her many demons, including her relationship with her former husband and a child she barely knows.
Strandberg is an acclaimed Swedish singer and actress whose breakthrough role was in Bo Widerberg’s Love 65, which was awarded the Fipresci in the 1965 Berlin International Film Festival, and received international acclaim in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminine in 1966.
He looked for a setting where dreams and reality, present and past, all melt together
Schygulla is described by IMDB.com as a “lead icon of the influential New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s”, and is best-known for her collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
The Quiet Roar is Swedish director Henrik Hellström’s second film after the critically-acclaimed Burrowing (2009). In an interview with Variety, the director described where his inspiration for The Quiet Roar came from.
He said that he looked for a setting where dreams and reality, present and past, all melt together. He wanted to tell the story of an older woman with an unsolved past.
He cites his own grandmother who, when in a state of senile dementia, started talking about the way she saw herself and she was afraid and bitter, piquing his curios-ity about what could give her peace.
The Quiet Roar was nominated for the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the Goteborg International Film Festival, while the jury awarded cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel the Sven Nykvist Cinemato-graphy Award for his work on the film, citing his excel-lent camera use, which em-powers him to illuminate the characters’ inner states.