Efter Barnen
Duration: 14 minutes
Short Synopsis
Friday evening, winter time. A new apartment, a middle aged couple, their son and daughter and a guest. A light bulb that goes on and off. Through a closed chamber drama, the film investigates divided feelings between a husband and wife toward upcoming changes in their roles as parents.
Biography of the director
Olga Ruin is a filmmaker and writer of film criticism. Her work revolves around family relations and states of in-betweenness. Space and place become characters in themselves. Her films depart from the idea that you can never really know a person before you’ve seen them standing at a cross-road.
Olga Ruin
olgaruin@gmail.com
+46-73 707 74 26
Artist Statement
Hard work – plain beauty.
The world that we enter in Olga Ruin’s films is at times plain. But it is also beautiful, and not in the way one might have expected. The kind of beauty that is always a bit plain – a sombre, clean, cool and ascetic beauty – is not the kind we are dealing with here. Beauty, in the films of Olga Ruin, is always hard fought, and fraught with a feeling perhaps best described as longing and regret.
The gestures are small: the sudden sharpening of the eyes, visible in the face of a young woman studying to be a conductor but who’s stuck on her day job. The ever so slightly forced confidence in the voice of a young schoolboy, telling the girls in his class that he will move away from the city to the countryside. Or, in Efter barnen, a family drama with very little drama in it. When it is over, we are not even certain if anything at all has happened. Maybe everything went as planned. But something has changed, and it will never be the same again.
If there is a way out of this world, it cannot be seen. But sometimes, it can be heard: in the mechanical rhythms of the subway train, in the monotonous piano scales or in the first few notes of a tune that you once used to know. We have all had the experience, and there is no missing of the meaning in it.
