Blodsbånd is another great movie from the hands of director and producer Marius Holst. As in "Cross my heart and hope to die" the main character is once again a youngster starting to understand the world around him.
Mirush decides to travel from a poor situation in Kosovo to follow the dream of his recently dead older brother, to find his father in Oslo. He's smuggled into Norway, and find the father's restaurant and the father who doesn't recognize him, since Mirush was a small kid when the father left. He finds that the father is troubled by Albanian mafia, and has started a new life with a Norwegian girlfriend.
Mirush is played perfectly by a Macedonian boy, and all the rest of the international crew is also perfect in their roles. With everything impressive both with directing and acting, this should be a perfect film, though it's not.
The story is both tender, scary, shocking, tragic and beautiful during the more than 100 minutes. If there's anything to say negatively about this film, it'll have to be the slow pace. You could say that this is to give depth to the story, and so is plausible, but still the pace might ruin this film for many. You'll have to be totally in to the story to get all the emotions.
The film has a lot of male anger, and maybe that's why the film have several possible endings. Towards the end you speculate how this will end, and you might as well be right as wrong.
Maybe this also comes down to cultural differences. I don't know. I enjoyed the movie, but find it hard to give it more than 7 out of 10 stars. I think I would have felt stronger about it if the film showed stronger emotions. But then again, that's not the male way of doing it, either in Kosovo or Oslo.
On the DVD release there's additional removed scenes which actually should not have been removed. They would have made the film stronger. With those, the film would probably have been given 8 stars by me.
