Sister, What Grows Where Land Is Sick?

Part of the ARTE film festival 2023, a film you feel you just have to see because the selected films MUST be good.

Set in beautiful and rough norther Norway, in a barren and cold landscape, we follow two late teen sisters. The younger tells the story (the film plot according to description) about how she reads the diary of the older sister.

This could lead to many different plots, but this is where the film seems to lose the direction. The older sister has a diary full of glitter, drawings, clipouts, fairly dystopian and somehow desparate. But the scenes that follow in the next 1 hour or so are like a lot of 3-5 minute shorts set together, featuring the same sisters but totally out of context. We see the older sister in a tub telling about ripping open her skin. Next the two sisters may be somewhere on a street hitchhiking, followed by them taking a swim.

You really feel like you WANT to make sense of all this, but just can't make a story of it. And you feel in the end "maybe I'm just too stupid to understand such an intellectual movie". As in the old fairy tale of the emperor's new clothes.