Kalak

Incipit; a boy is asleep on the couch, an older man comes in, tells him about an erotic dream, grabs his member praising the hardness and simultaneous softness asking him if he can continue with fellatio.

Jan was born in Copenhagen is married and has two children.

He moved to Greenland where he passionately practices nursing.

He has more than one extramarital affair and confesses this to his wife, who does not seem particularly upset.

Letters keep arriving from his father that he does not want to open, until his wife persuades him to do so: they learn that he has throat cancer and does not have long to live.

Jan confessed to another woman what he had never revealed to his wife: that he had been abused by his father since childhood. His wife had realized, by revealing this to him, that his extramarital escapades were a revenge against his father.

A film about the past that does not pass especially that of abuse, where the geographical escape does not exhaust the psychological/emotional/existential one.

The cruel distress brought on fails to find catharsis except in drugs readily available in hospital wards, until his daughter's accident takes him back to the country of his birth.

Here his last meeting with his ailing father yet never contrite or repentant of his ever-denied past as a pedophile. Hers was "love" outside the herd of social recognition, so argues the life-busted parent, yet still too, unbearably vital and arrogant Marquis De Sade.

Thus the prologue joins the epilogue in a film, at first confusing and scattershot then increasingly compelling and desperate in its portrayal of Jan's biographical journey poised between being and having to be, between parenthood and relationship, between the culture of the Kalak, i.e., Greenlandic dirt and that of the credible and recognized professional.

Between female loneliness to be bridged and cruel trauma to be processed; between choosing to live and choosing to survive, to the point where ultimate liberation from that evil seems the only decisive step to dispense.