The Together Project

This film screens as part of Pix Rendez-Vous. The section is a collaboration between Oslo Pix and Institut Français, and includes nine French titles at this year’s programme. It is a continuation of the festival Rendez-Vous with French film, which for many years has presented the remarkable quality of contemporary French cinema to a Norwegian audience.

Recent romantic comedies tend to be too much of one thing and too little of another, and originality is few and far between. But The Together Project is a breath of fresh air to the genre, it is in fact truly romantic and really funny – without giving way to cynicism. In the French-Icelandic cocktail, we meet the shy crane driver Samir, who is willing to go to absurd lengths to get close to the swimming teacher Agathe. He pretends he can't swim, and it works to a certain point. When his plan succeeds and is thwarted at the same time, he is forced to follow her to an international lifeguard convention in Iceland, and from then on the story turns truly bizarre as amnesia turns everything upside down. The two protagonists have great chemistry and comic timing, and it is wonderful that they look and behave like the rest of us, and not just like more or less well-written clichés in a worn genre. CPH:PIX

Solveig Anspach (1960-2015) was an Iceland-American director and screenwriter. She studied philosophy and clinical psychology in France before she made a career in film. She has made several documentaries in France, and later in Iceland and the USas well. Her first feature film was Haut Les Coeurs! in 1999.