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The Mountain – Fjallið (Scandinavian Film Festival)

The Mountain (Scandinavian Film Festival) Rating

★★★★★

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Director and Screenwriter Ásthildur Kjartansdóttir’s third full length feature is about grief, dealing with loss, guilt and growth. Filmed in the sparse beauty of an Icelandic autumn, it is a cosmic journey that handles these themes with sombre grace in this excellent film well worth the audience’s engagement.

Set in the port town of Hafnarfjörður, a town outside Reykjavík, Maria (Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir) an Astronomer, has planned a family trip to the highlands of Iceland to photograph what she hopes is a comet. When the weekend arrives however her husband Atli (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), a one-time guitarist but now an Electrician stuck on a job with a client he despises, informs her that he has to work all weekend. Their nineteen-year-old daughter Anna (Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney), an aspiring Musician, also informs her mother that she can’t go because her band will be performing on the weekend. Maria travels by herself but has an unfortunate accident and dies, which triggers a path of grief and guilt for both Atli and Anna. It also starts them on other paths as they deal with her loss.

Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, probably best known in Australia for his role as Pétur in the outstanding Lamb (2021) and as Dries in Northern Comfort (2023) shines in the role of Atli. Haraldsson’s portrayal of the grieving husband on a personal journey deftly depicts the wide range of emotion that Atli transverses in a very skilful manner.

 

The Mountain (Scandinavian Film Festival)
The Mountain (Scandinavian Film Festival)

 

The role of the daughter, Anna, is correspondingly exceptionally portrayed by Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney. The Mountain – Fjallið marking her debut in a major film role, having previously played the minor role of Melkorka in The Northman (2022) (which also featured her actual mother, Musician/Actor, Björk, as Seeress, the blind sorceress). The scenes with Björn Hlynur Haraldsson outstandingly highlight the father and daughter relationship in crises.

The other roles of the mother, Maria, played by Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir, and Anna’s boyfriend Kári played by Vilberg Andri Pálsson are also portrayed very well as are the other roles by all the cast. Cinematographer, Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson, takes full advantage of the light and shades of the Icelandic landscape. For the indoor scenes he impressively utilises outside natural light as a focus for the action of the scenes.

The Mountain – Fjallið is the first officially vetted sustainable production in Iceland noted for “marking a significant milestone and contributing to the establishment of a standard for sustainability in the Icelandic film industry”, and has been awarded the prestigious Green Film Sustainability certification.

Although only her third full length feature film, Ásthildur Kjartansdóttir is a veteran Director of Photography, Producer, Sound, Editor, Script Supervisor, Writer, and Producer, The Mountain – Fjallið sees her at her peak power in this first-rate film. If the rest of the films in the Scandinavian Film Festival are of this standard, then it will be an outstanding Festival.

Reviewed by Rob McKinnon

Rating; 8 out of 10
Genre: Drama
YouTube trailer: https://scandinavianfilmfestival.com/films/sca25-the-mountain

To book tickets to this, or any films in the Scandinavian Film Festival, please visit https://scandinavianfilmfestival.com.

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The Offering

The Offering

The Offering Rating

★★★★★

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This brilliant play by Borneo/Australian rapper/poet Omar Musa and American classical musician Mariel Roberts Musa combines poetic storytelling with live music to create a riveting theatrical experience. Omar weaves oral histories and personal narratives, and, accompanied by Mariel’s exquisite cello playing, they create a deeply resonant and haunting seafaring story delivered with extraordinary accomplishment.

The Offering tells the story of a protagonist fleeing a country whose ecology has collapsed under the perils of climate change. Deforestation and its associated logging, clearing and burning have culminated in a ‘climate holocaust.’

The protagonist sets sail across a vast plastic ocean littered with debris. The ocean’s surface brims with discarded bottles, fabrics and other plastic horrors in what is a tragic indictment of humankind’s mass-production of all things synthetic. Despairing, he sails toward a mythical volcano where he hopes to find his own destruction amid its fire and ferocity. On his journey, he encounters items in the ocean that are familiar to him, triggering memories of life before the climate holocaust. Upon reaching the volcano, he discovers something much different, hope and the promise of a world free of borders and constraints.

Omar’s performance is powerful and evocative. He engages the audience, who respond with rapt attention. He likens the ocean to an ‘archipelago of memories’ and moved by what he sees, he tells the boyhood memory of his grandparents and their lopsided jungle shack by the river. His body dances with the words and music, seamlessly attuned. He raps, he sings, performs poetry. His hand movements shift from strong to delicately expressive in an instant, which took this reviewer’s breath away.

 

The Offering
The Offering

 

Mariel’s cello playing is an emotional kaleidoscope – from bold, to mournful, to raw, to lyrical, she has composed a divine accompaniment to Omar’s spoken word. She becomes so bodily immersed in the piece, it’s like she and her cello become one. At one point, Omar invites the audience to join in some collective breathing. We follow his lead. So does the cello. Its inhalations and exhalations are so authentic, this reviewer found herself in awe at Mariel’s mastery of her instrument.

The Offering successfully intertwines its musical score, oral histories and Omar’s personal narratives in a way that moves the story forward with the sense of urgency it warrants. Contemporary discussion around climate change has never been more important, and The Offering shows us the stark and devastating end reality we, as a planet, are rapidly facing if we refuse to act.

The play looks at memories as a way to effect and recognise change. Lost memories become found in a sea of ecological destruction. Thoughts of earlier and more simple times offer something tangible to hold onto in a world so artificial, so lost, roiling in its own devastation.

The set design reflects and complements the subject matter. It’s a dark stage, interspersed with the blue hues of the ocean; a changing black and white backdrop mirrors and enhances the storyline, and soft lighting transitions beautifully between Omar and Mariel.

The Offering speaks to the audience. And the audience listens.

To book tickets to The Offering, please visit https://riversideparramatta.com.au/whats-on/the-offering/.

Photographer: Phil Erbacher

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Aphrodite: Beauty Disassembled

Aphrodite

Aphrodite Rating

★★★★★

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In Sydney Chamber Opera’s Aphrodite, the act of looking becomes its own kind of violence. Composed by acclaimed American composer Nico Muhly with a libretto by Laura Lethlean, and presented in association with Omega Ensemble, this striking new work reimagines the goddess of love not as a figure of desire but as a symbol of distortion; a mirror in which the modern self dissolves.

The story follows Ava, a thoughtful academic whose book, The Aphrodite Complex, catapults her to sudden fame after being adapted into a hit documentary. As her public image grows, her personal life fractures. Ava becomes consumed by the pursuit of perfection, sculpting herself for the gaze of others while losing touch with intimacy, authenticity, and selfhood. When the goddess Aphrodite herself appears, cool, composed, and elusive, Ava’s carefully constructed world begins to collapse.

Aphrodite
Aphrodite

Director Alexander Berlage’s use of live video is both conceptually and theatrically masterful. Cameras flank the stage, embedded in mobile phones, and hang from the ceiling, capturing the performers in extreme close-up. These images, not just of faces but of hands, feet, clothing, trembling skin, are projected on a large screen above the stage, which simultaneously displays the libretto. What emerges is a fragmented portrait of each character: isolated body parts, captured and magnified, turned into objects of scrutiny and aesthetic judgement.

Rather than drawing the audience closer, these hyper-intimate visuals create distance. We are not watching the characters as whole people; we are dissecting them. The body becomes content. Ava becomes an image. Even her moments of vulnerability are caught, cropped, and curated. The overhead camera is particularly cruel: it frames her from above like an anatomical specimen, cold and clinical, as if the goddess herself were observing.

Jessica O’Donoghue gives a deeply affecting performance as Ava, vocally assured and emotionally transparent. Her portrayal balances intellect and fragility, making Ava’s descent into disconnection feel both inevitable and tragic. Puerto Rican soprano Meechot Marrero, in her Australian debut, brings an arresting stillness to Aphrodite. Her presence is magnetic and inscrutable, her voice radiant. She is not temptation incarnate but myth personified; unknowable, unmoved.

Aphrodite
Aphrodite

Muhly’s score is luminous and precise, shifting between shimmering textures and silences that seem to stretch time. The Omega Ensemble plays with clarity and control, amplifying the opera’s psychological tension without overwhelming its introspective tone.

Aphrodite is a cool, elegant gut-punch of an opera, a work that refuses sentimentality in favour of scalpel-like insight. It’s about beauty, yes, but more importantly, it’s about the cost of being seen only in parts. By disassembling its characters on screen and in sound, it delivers a quietly devastating truth: there can be no connection until we are allowed to exist as whole.

To book tickets to Aphrodite, please visit https://www.sydneychamberopera.com/2025/02/17/aphrodite/.

Photographer: Daniel Boud

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Koreaboo: Showing Now At The Belvoir Theatre

Koreaboo

Koreaboo Rating

★★★★★

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Koreaboo (Griffin Theatre Company), now playing at Downstairs Belvoir is actor and playwright Michelle Lim Davidson’s story of being a Korean Australian adoptee. But as Lim Davidson states in her playwright’s notes in the program, Koreaboo is not just her story; it is the story of so many international adoptees who have found themselves growing up caught between two cultures, perhaps always grappling with the unanswered questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’

The intimate space of the Downstairs Theatre at Belvoir is perfect for the cramped, fluorescent-lit convenience store or ‘mart’ in which most of the play’s action takes place. Hannah (Lim Davidson) arrives, straight off a flight from Sydney, at her biological mother, Umma’s, mart during a sweltering Korean summer. It’s soon revealed they’ve had contact before but this time Hannah has high expectations for her visit – she wants to finally connect with her Umma, and she desperately wants some answers to her long-held questions about her Korean family.

Umma, played delightfully by Heather Jeong, smiles sweetly, but her apparent cuteness belies a stubborn determination to avoid her past at all costs. Her life is firmly situated in the present, stacking ramen cups, fixing a pesky fridge light and tending to her colourful collection of garden gnomes. Umma would rather Hannah had never turned up on her neatly swept doorstep. And she doesn’t hesitate to take any opportunity to remind Hannah of this.

Koreaboo
Koreaboo
Koreaboo

Michelle Lim Davidson is a gifted comedic actor, and in writing Koreaboo, she has wisely used comedy to portray a heartbreaking story. Rather than making her story glib, however, the humour serves to help us connect with the pathos of the situation, avoiding melodramatic cliches that other stories of reuniting with lost relatives might fall into. Initially appearing to be an odd couple, it soon becomes clear Hannah and Umma both share a love of performing.

Hannah tries to impress Umma with a rendition of her winning ‘All That Jazz’ number for the Lake Macquarie Eisteddfod 12 years category, but Umma is scathing: ‘Your mother let you wear a sequinned leotard at 12?’ Umma who is obsessed with the talent show Star Power (think Australia’s Got Talent K-style) lives out her own unfulfilled dreams through the contestants on screen. The reality show becomes a point of connection for the two: What if Hannah can revive her long-dormant stage skills and win Star Power? Would Umma finally accept her then?

K-pop culture infuses Koreaboo. Umma randomly quotes from K-pop songs and is obsessed with the eerily pretty Korean pop star, Suga. In fact, the term ‘Koreaboo’ (far from just a cute sounding name as I initially thought), is slang for a non-Korean person who is infatuated with Korean culture, especially K-pop and K-dramas. But, it’s not applied in a complimentary way. Is Hannah a ‘Koreaboo’, someone who is desperately trying to be Korean but never will be?

Derogatory term or not, Koreaboo is a delightful story that deserves to be told, but also to be seen. My hope is that more untold stories of adoptees like Michelle Lim Davidson are given a platform (or stage), rather than being ignored or conveniently brushed under the carpet. How many other cross-cultural stories do Australians have that are waiting to be told? Griffin Theatre Company has shown again that they truly are the grassroots champion of home-grown Australian theatre, giving voice to contemporary, multicultural Australian stories.

To book tickets to Koreaboo, please visit https://griffintheatre.com.au/whats-on/koreaboo/.

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