Denmark,
1956, 119 min
Shown in 1957
CREDITS
- dir
-
Erik Balling
- scr
-
Leck Fischer
- cam
-
Poul Pedersen
- editor
-
Carsten Dahl
- mus
-
Svend Erik Tarp
- cast
-
Astrid Villaneuve, Dorthe Reimer, Poul Reichhardt, Gunnar Lauring, Randi Michelsen, Bjorn Watt-Boolsen
- prod co
-
Nordisk Film
-
COMMENTS
Showed Saturday, December 15 at 8:30pm.
OTHER
Qivitoc from Denmark, of all the pictures shown during the Festival, is the most spectacular: a sensational glimpse in magnificent color of the wintry landscape of Greenland. Far from being blue and pallid, in its chilly portrait of the long day above the Arctic Circle, it presents a breathtaking series of panoramas as colorful as they are unusual. This is a story of Europeans on Greenland. Astrid Villaneuve goes there to surprise her fiancé and instead finds herself surprised, for he, a doctor (Bjorn Watt-Boolsen), had promised to marry a nurse at the hospital where he is working. In her grief, she goes father north, to visit a remote community where Gunnar Lauring is the only white man, and here what one might expect takes place. But not foolishly: there are two mature persons who realize their romance may have flowered from loneliness and desperation, and finally both learn that it is far more deeply rooted than that. The term "Qivitoq" refers to a man who, when scorned by his community, flees to the hills behind to become a sort of spirit, for he never returns. When one young man, a sealer who turns fisherman, thus loses face and runs away, the subsequent chase is an extremely exciting climax to an absorbing film.
–Paine Knickerbocker, San Francisco Chronicle
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
