Told through the eyes of 15-year-old Fanny (Kaya Toft Loholt), the intimate, deeply moving ( ) observes an eventful vacation spent waiting for Fanny’s terminally ill mother, Karin (Maria Rossing), to die. In delicately balanced scenes filled with poignant detail, Denmark-based director Sylvia Le Fanu (making her feature debut) and her co-writer Mads Lind Knudsen unfurl a very Scandinavian portrait of a highly cultured bourgeois family facing a terrible trauma with stoicism, humor and quite a bit of drinking, often in tastefully decorated rooms. After premiering in the New Directors strand at San Sebastian, the drama takes a short break to play in the BFI London Film Festival in another competitive strand.
Its accessible depth of feeling could help it win distribution beyond the Nordic realms. Although Fanny appears in practically every scene in the film, the camera does occasionally break away to spend moments alone here and there with Fanny’s parents, Karin and Johan (Anders Mossling), as they cope with the logistics and inner turmoil of dealing with Karin’s impending death, presumably from cancer. But the viewpoint is so embedded with Fanny that, mimicking the way children live in blissful ignorance of how their parents provide for them, the sparse script never even tells us exactly what the couple do for a living — though scenes of Karin playing piano throughout and later talk of her students suggest she was either a musician or music teacher, while Johan’s dry w.
