ENGELEN
Category: Feature Film
Director: Margreth Olin
Country: Norway, Sweden, Finland
Year: 2009
Length: 97'
Production Status: completed
Participating Shooting Stars:
Maria Bonnevie
Trailer
Website
ANGEL, THE
THE ANGEL is a story about women. About carrying and inheriting Mummy´s traumas. When addiction rules all your decisions.
Lea grows up in a home characterized by lack of protection. From being a cheerful, curious little girl, Lea changes dramatically when her mother Madeleine returns to her ex-boyfriend Ole. The death dance between the two adults harms the child growing up between them.
Dope enables Lea to hold out everyday life with her family. Then Lea gives birth to her daughter Sonja. She wishes to break with her family and start a new life. She wants to take care of her child and give her the protection she herself never got. But Lea soon realizes that she lacks the ability to do so. Consequently, she has to make an impossible decision.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
THE ANGEL is Margreth Olin's fiction film debut. It is based on a true story, and started out as a documentary about her best friend who is a heroin-addict. After two years of filming, her friend got "clean", and because of ethics Margreth Olin decided to make her friend`s story into a fiction film.
"The most beautiful person of all I know is my best friend. She suffers from a disease. It is called drug addiction. I have never before seen such a thin girl, such a strong body. She has a scar from the breast bone to the groin, and her hair is hanging in bunches down her back. I just picked her up at the new opera site in Bjørvika. I opened the car door so she could get in. She has been sitting on the front seat with a syringe in her thigh. She has told me that heroin can save lives.
Heroin was like learning how to fly. To take the plunge, to let go. The tension in the chest loosened up, and reality was no longer real. Lea is not only the most beautiful, she is also the strongest. And the most courageous. She does what she has to do and she pays what it costs."
