The amusement park water ride that appears in the introductory minutes of The Gullspang Miracle doesn’t begin to hint at the wild emotional roller coaster the film is about to unfurl. Two 60 sisters were contacted and they made an exciting discovery – a sister they never suspected of the man’s Existence – Director Maria Frederickson becomes the three women’s confidantes and documents their vacillations about this unexpected kinship relationship. The resulting work, her first feature-length documentary, is a startling and deft exploration of serendipity, belief, social divide, family ties and personal identity. It delves into some of the same themes that makeThree Identical Strangers so compelling, but its canvas is unique, and the dynamic composition also contains a haunting A haunting unsolved crime that echoes Lynchian from Twin Peaks.
Fredriksson doesn’t hide her role in telling this complex story. The film opens with her director sisters May and Kari walking into a white kitchen in Gullspang, Sweden, and describing to the camera the epiphany they experienced in that room. They took several shots, with Fredriksson encouraging them to be more “technical” rather than performative. They readily complied, and the stories they told were filled with joy and wonder. At least for a while.
Gullspang Miracle
Bottom line fasten your seatbelt.
Place : Tribeca Film Festival(Documentary Contest) Director: Maria Frederickson 1988 1 hour minutes
The events they recall revolved around a The framed needlepoint spreads out, which is weird. May recovered from a water injury during a visit to Kari, Sweden, and before she returned home to Norway, she took on a task to fill the downtime: She went property shopping. But her main goal is to find a particular type of still life to hang in any home she finds. Stepping into the kitchen of a Gullspang apartment for sale, she saw what she had been looking for and it was jaw-dropping. Most people will see the standard version of a fruit still life. For May, what hangs on the wall is an answered prayer. Cary, noting that it is the central element of a triptych ornament, saw the symbol of the Christian Trinity, a blessing.
Then they meet the woman who sells the apartment, and the miracle deepens: Olaug is a carbon copy of their sister Astrid, who is known to be in 1988 committed suicide. After some genealogy research and DNA testing, Olaug was welcomed as half-sisters May and Kari didn’t know they had twins separated at birth from their beloved Lita.
If three identical strangers stare straight at the wanton cruelty of scientific experiments, The Gullspang Miracle Acknowledge the consequences of escaping it. In 1941, when Lita and Olaug are born in occupied Norway, cautious parents and midwives know that twins are a problem that must be hidden— Or be sent to part ways – as the Nazis horribly fixed them as raw material for medical experiments. That angle alone is enough to make the story compelling. But there are many more angles, some of which are unusually torn.
Fredriksson is not concerned with tracing the branches of the family tree. For example, the marriage of the father of the three women is never detailed, and in the present tense, the film focuses on the siblings in addition to mentioning husbands and exes. The group soon expanded to include Kari and May’s brother Arnt and their sister Solveig. Olaug also meets Lita’s daughter, and the nanny who cared for baby Lita while her parents tended to their harvest.
She, who never knew she was a twin, described what she felt was missing throughout her life – the raw pain of a twin being separated from her sister? Cary recalls that Rita confided in her own deep and vague sense of loss. Rita’s 30-year-old home film reveals the undeniable resemblance between her and Olag, who is eager to point out their physical resemblance to the filmmaker and, as she stuffs her gadgets and Antique’s home found a place of honor to hang a picture of her newfound sibling. Another photo of Rita, a formal portrait, is on display in a shrine at Kari’s home, and when Pia Lehto’s deft camera is aimed at it, it eerily recalls Twin Peaks‘ Laura Palmer – Like Lita, she was found dead by the lake.
Olaug didn’t just question the suicide story – she also turned to the police for answers, but it turns out the police autopsy report was never shared with the family. While May, Cary, Arndt, and Solveig are relieved by the findings, the division that has been twisting the awkward surface makes it eye-opening as Olaug presses on and she insists that Rita was murdered . Inspiring and disturbing, her investigations and those of Frederickson ultimately cut through layers of resistance to touch hearts and minds. Differences in class and temperament proved harder to bridge.
Kari and May’s ecstasy gives way to hurt and resentment, and it becomes increasingly clear to Olaug that after the initial excitement of connection, they and the whole situation are being kept at arm’s length. Artistic, elegant, urbane, with her asymmetrical haircut and a single dangling earring, she wasn’t sure at first “how to find her place among these people” whose lives were steeped in small-town vibes. In tradition and religion. When she returns to Arnt’s farm to clean the air with him and his sisters, the air is filled with wariness.
Olaug, who does chores in a wealthy – May and Kari and their peasant parents on the other side of the fjord, is condescending and inaccurately talks about their childhood “poverty” and ” suffering”. In interviews on camera, she struggles to understand the destructive idea of starting a whole new family in 60, but the strengths she expresses become increasingly The increasingly bizarre, poignant references to her IQ and military knowledge. As a non-believer, Olag is particularly outraged that her half-siblings want to convert her – an allegation the film offers no evidence of.
No malice was seen when the extended family sang a short, cheerful song of thanks to Jesus before the meal. But if that song, and all it stands for, is unforgivably offensive to visiting relatives, that’s up to her to fix it—as Olaug apparently did, in jaw-dropping fashion. “Is anyone lying?” Fredrickson demanded behind the camera, when a pivotal reversal was revealed. She added, provoking the audience to think, “What’s going on?!” The answer was something else. But the way things play out, it’s impossible not to draw parallels with America’s rigid we-vs-them social climate, or a reminder that suave sophistication has few opposites to narrow-mindedness.
All of this – the joy, the heaviness, the tense interactions, the private confessions and the sit-down interview – is captured with gripping intimacy by Fredriksson and her small team of collaborators arrive. Leto’s moving cinematography achieves subtle intensity, from the film’s sun-drenched, symmetrical compositions early on to the painterly vistas of winter woods near the scene of a young woman’s mysterious death. Editors Mark Bukdahl and Orvar Anklew shape the scene with pulsating, sharp sensitivity, and Jehane Noujaim’s Square ) Thrilling soundtrack blends with emotion, suspense and change
“This movie is supposed to be positive,” when the twists reach the weird and painful New level, Cary said with an injured voice in a voicemail to Fredrickson. Gullspang Miracle Didn’t go down the joyously celebratory path Kari and May envisioned, but “positive” was in the eye of the beholder. This is a terrific film, full of detail, deep and resonant. From start to finish (some kind of end credits), it’s an illuminating exploration not only of how we tell the stories we tell, but also of how we choose what to believe – sometimes despite everything that’s happening in front of us, or how much of it We were all rejected.
