Ivalu

Ivalu is missing when the film begins. Her younger sister, Pipaluk, doesn’t know what has happened. Their father doesn’t seem worried. At school, everything is normal. Everyone is talking about an impending visit by the Queen (presumably Margrethe II of Denmark), and how they are going to perform for her in national dress. Do they know what has happened to Ivalu? Are they keeping something from her? Is she keeping something from herself?

Pipaluk’s world is a small one, tucked into a corner of a vast landscape. We journey with her through all the places in and around the small Greenland town where she imagines that her sister might be. Looking to tradition where other clues fail her, she is guided by a crow, but it is her very human experience of these places which comes through strongly, and as she recalls what she and Ivalu did in each of them, we get to know these girls, to understand what life was to them and what it meant. It’s the specificity of these vignettes which gives the film its intensity, as much as the shadow hanging over the search.

The cause of that shadow won’t be very difficult for adult viewers to guess. Mystery doesn’t seem to be the intent here; rather, we are privy to Pipaluk’s interior journey and to the psychological shift which occurs as she begins to understand. It’s an early step towards adulthood, and it’s one which will precipitate another big change in her life which in turn brings us closer to the past and its traditions.

Crisp cinematography and director Anders Walter’s committed approach to the narrative, which captures that mixture of immediacy and distance in children’s relationship to adult behaviours, make this short had to forget. Nominated for the 2023 Oscars, it’s an intimate work which speaks to experiences far beyond this remote, icy world.