HIM

Eleven-year-old Harald (Frank Werner Laug) doesn’t receive acknowledgement or understanding from his family or at school, which makes him frustrated and alienated. Eirik (Emil Johnsen) is an unemployed thirty-something who had great plans for the future but has fallen behind and is being humiliated at the Public Employment Office. The well-known screenwriter Petter (Johannes Joner) is 60 and has worked on a biopic about Fridtjof Nansen for years, but the project fails to receive funding, making Petter struggle with an inferiority complex.

In HIM, we follow these three men through 24 hours of social and emotional downfalls at various locations in Oslo. Director Guro Bruusgaard has proclaimed that the idea for her feature film debut originated from reading that when women are asked what they feared the most from the opposite sex, the most common answer is being murdered. When men are asked the same question, that answer is being made into laughter.

The statistics show that boys more often than girls become dropouts. Coinciding, populist movements such as alt-right are often embraced by angry and offended men. And, even though men are still considered to have more economic and material power in society, there is steadily more talk about a masculinity in crisis.

HIM is both tragic and comical. It is beyond doubt that Bruusgaard, with her direct and highly contemporary look at outsiderness, resentment and manhood has made one of this year’s most essential Norwegian films – carried forward by impressive performances by the three leading actors.

Johanne Svendsen Rognlien

Director

Guro Bruusgaard (b. 1977) is a Norwegian director who has her education from Nordland Kunst- og filmfagskole and Filmhögskolan i Göteborg. She has previously made the short film Sirkus in 2010. Bruusgaard works as director, producer, screenwriter and editor, and has collaborated with the Swedish director a screenwriter Fijona Jonuzi for a long period of time. In 2017, she founded the production company Alternativet together with three other Norwegian filmmakers.

This film is part of