Segundo Sinal

I saw the film at The Norwegian film festival in Rome,Italy in the spring of 1997, and it was the film I enjoyed the most. I loved the dialect(Western Norway),the landscape scenes were beautiful. Ola Solum(film director) managed to make an interesting film staged in the deepest of medieval times and centered in a single valley of the countryside. The tragedy of the film is the arrival of the plague that kills everyone in the countryside hamlet except for a 6 yr.old girl who has to fend for herself for almost a year. When some hunters passed by(legend has it) she lived and behaved like a wild animal!!....and was treated with suspicion and dread by the neighbouring villagers ...as she had become according to them a witch !! For Norwegians this film as a special resonance,since the plague was considered one of the two major tragedies to befall Norway in it's history(the other was the Nazi occupation during the second world war!)..the plague killed so many Norwegians that the country seriously weakened came to lose it's independence and be subjucated to Danish rule for 700 years. It's a film only Norwegians can appreciate truly, for the above mentioned reasons,and especially for me as I am an ex-patriot Norwegian.