In En Maler, An old man lives in a house far away from everyone. He’s a famous artist, who has left the mundane world and created a small, carefully designed universe for himself and his art. His house is full of light and books, and he can see horses walking around every time he looks through the window. He doesn’t need other people. All he needs is his dog and his paint – at least that’s what he thinks.

Preview by Daria Sukharchuk. Jutland Station. 

A Painter has won an award for the Best Danish Short Film in Odense Film Festival, and will be now showing at SPOT the Film today and tomorrow.
Directed by Icelandic filmmaker, Hlynur Pálmason for his graduation from the National Film School of Denmark, this film was shot and written in Skagen ‒ in the very north of Denmark. Working this way ‒ writing the film on location and letting it to tell its own story ‒ is a method characteristic of Pálmason.

The story unfolds at a relatively slow pace, with a lot of attention to the light and textures of this greyish-green Nordic landscape. The actors speaks very little: sounds of footsteps, working engines and hammers, it seems, are no less important than the voice.

It works perfectly for the story, showing the world the way the main character sees it. Pálmason says “we wanted to find the simplest way to tell the story, to create a dialog.”

However, the outside world doesn’t want to leave the artist alone: a journalist who comes to interview him about his work and starts asking personal questions. Then his son turns up unexpectedly on his doorstep, and the painter finds himself powerless as he realises that the world he designed for himself will never be the way it used to be, and there is no way he can stop this.

“When I shoot the film, I never try to put a statement into it ‒ for me it’s all about a helpless statement. I let it surprise me, and I think it’s the only way to be truthful,” comments Pálmason.

In this case, it seems, the whole film is about helplessness: nobody, even an artist, can escape the reality. And in a round-about way A Painter seems to also fit with SPOT festival’s initial idea: tell the world about creative Scandinavians, and help them get together.

See A Painter at SPOT Festival today at 14:30 at the Katapult Prøvesal, Godsbanen or tomorrow at 19:30 at Sal B, Øst for Paradis.

Daria Sukharchuk is a Russian journalist, who has worked as a freelance journalist for Moscow-based online magazines W-O-S and Edutnaime.

This article was produced independently by Jutland Station.