Året gjennom Børfjord (1991) User Reviews

Excellent work!

[B & M · 10/10 · 18 September 1999]

An unique work, an unprecedented short-film in his period. There are some things that aren't said, for example that it took eleven years to be done. Hundred and fifty days in shooting, with an special computer program in those days where technology wasn't exactly what we know. Imagine this: between each frame in the film are 16 centimeters, the complete trajectory of the road is two and a half kilometers. If you can see it in some festival go, I really recommend it, the music is also excellent.

Neither captivating nor atmospheric

[Horst_In_Translation · 4/10 · 25 November 2017]

"Året gjennom Børfjord" or "A Year Along the Abandoned Road" is a Norwegian documentary from 1991, so this one had its 25th birthday already last year and today despite its very brief runtime of only 12 minutes, it is probably the most known career effort by writer and director Morten Skallerud, which does not really say a great deal of positive about him. This could very well be his first career work and the awards attention it received makes it even more impressive, also outside of Norway. But I did not really think this was a good watch. The music was fairly distracting I thought and took away attention even more from the already very mediocre visual component. The cinematography is never as stunning as I hoped it would be, especially given the filmmaker's cinematographer background. Anyway, one good thing here is that there is no dialogue or narration, so you won't need subtitles for the Norwegian language and this probably helped the film too in making a bit of a global impact if you can already call it like that. What else? The version I saw was in black-and-white, but according to IMDb it is a color film, so there may be different versions out there. I think that is all then. There was nothing in here I found memorable sadly, neither the landscapes nor the fast-forwarding nor the essential(ism) execution. This project certainly sounded far more interesting than it looked here. Very disappointing execution. Skip the watch here.