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The northern lights protect us from evil – Mom said – but all that is now a long way off.
A fight in the yard of a reformatory. A bite deep into another’s flesh. Freja is also injured, but she cannot be captured. She defends herself against everything without compromise and is her own fortress. But suddenly she has to say goodbye to her deceased mother within a day.
Freja first kidnaps her mother’s ashes, then her little brother Bruno, and risks everything to unite her family.
Actress Charleen Elea draws us in raw and authentic. We get caught up in a maelstrom that sweeps us away, exposes us to Freja’s brutality, makes her loneliness palpable and tenderly exposes the longing for a final embrace. This young person scares us and we fear even more for Freja and her brother.
This succeeds not least because we are unable to escape the light and density of Nico Schrenk’s images. They tell of unbridled freedom and internal and external limitations. Always at eye level with the characters. We don’t forget the twists and turns driven by anger and tenderness that Simon Schneckenburger and his co-author Sejad Ademaj created in the script and how, in just 24 minutes, the film consistently leads us to believable and loving decisions by the main character that were not foreseeable. What seemed doomed to complete failure finally allows Freja to let go because she doesn’t fail because of herself.