Children of Nature - Eine Reise

I have known about this movie long time, but only recently had chance to see it. Unfortunately, I have to say that I expected something more. I cannot comment on photography as I have seen very poor copy. But as far as the storytelling goes, this film is too shallow, too naive, too lacking depth for my tastes. Number of scenes stick out like sore thumb. Take the scene where police chases the jeep with the couple: it just vanishes - without any relation to anything, without any explanation. Or the scene with that country festival - what was it? Why was it? Or the naked woman on a cliff ("ghost" as she is mentioned). If the scene wasn't there, nothing would change. And there's more of this stuff.

The overall feeling is that of clumsiness. This looks more like student film than an opus from an accomplished director. I felt somewhat embarrassed for taking my girlfriend with me to see this movie.

BTW, I have seen "Cold Fever" by Fridrik Thor and I think it is better movie than the "Children of Nature".

I would like to say that I was very happy to know that the middle name of the director is Thor. It is pretty difficult for us, Brazilians, to deal with the Icelandic characters. This is the director's second film I've seen. The first was MammaGogó and I translated both subtitles from English into Portuguese. I know we loose a lot in translating from one language to another, guess when we have to go through two translations! So, I am taking into consideration that I lost a lot from the original idea of the director. My feeling was that he had an excellent material, a road movie with two elders, who don't't have any longer the right to leave their own lives as they wish (well, one, the other was somewhat resigned to his fate). The film could be more profound as it is a problem faced overall the world, but he chose to make it naive. I don't't blame his choice, otherwise the two nice couple wouldn't walk one meter before been stopped and probably arrested. I congratulated with the director because he was audacious enough to bring up a subject that many people rather ignore. I am not an expert in Icelandic filmography and I surely will look forward to watch "Cold Fever", mentioned by one of the reviewers, and I would like to emphasize that he used elements of Icelandic folklore in order to help those fugitives who believed in such elements. It was just a matter of tradition and culture. My guessing.

I´m sorry to say, but this film is one of the worst from Iceland. It has some of the most dumbest plot lines ever filmed, and everyone who has ever heard anything of Iceland knows that old people are not mistreated the way it´s portrayed in this flick. An Oscar nomination...give me a break. It would have been more believable to let Die Hard take place here than this film.

Since making Children of Nature he not made anything worthwhile, so he has passed his peak. He's made about 4-5 very bad films since nearly winning an oscar for this average but entertaining film. And he never really made anything good before this. It's a shame that he runs the Icelandic film industry single handedly.

"Children of Nature" is a light-hearted film that pull off an awe-inspiring saga of Thorgeir (Gísli Halldórsson), an elderly farmer and his childhood sweetheart, 79-year-old Stella (Sigridur Hagalín) who meet at a rest home. They steal a jeep and set off on an adventurous journey, back to their roots, back to where they were and are children of nature as the authorities are on the look out to bring them back to the retirement home. Glad the film didn't take the Bertrand Blier's Going Places (1974) approach in the writing. Imagine the public reaction, especially the Church!!

Traditionally, older films have a heavy feel of "over acting" to help get the point across with irritating soundtrack or forced lines to tug the heartstrings but this film was spot on is a fantastic as everything comes together in a beautiful all the way through the powerful final scene as surreal scene featuring Bruno Ganz.

The film touches on the effect of urbanization and the real life that is seized from mother and the relationship between Thorgeir & Stella is shot in an extremely beautiful way. The story, music, cinematography, direction and, I hazard to say, a near perfect performances combine to make for a compelling film. I would recommend to watch this and would make a perfect double bill along with Waking Ned Devine (1998).