Strange River

A family sets out on a cycling trip along the Danube river, travelling through verdant summery landscapes. The family’s eldest son, 16-year-old Dídac, is coming-of-age and thus struggling: the nuclear family provides a kind of safety and idyll, but his adolescence and the need for independence bring new complexity into his family relations. Dídac’s attention is caught by a mysterious stranger diving towards him from the depths of the nocturnal Danube. When the stranger appears to him repeatedly, something in Dídac begins to change. During the trip, his mother Monika also starts to reminisce about her first love that took place alongside the same river 25 years earlier.

Strange River carries the viewer through vibrant summer rays, sweaty nights in a tent, heavy rain, and the blurry underwater world. Readiness for change and on the other hand the necessity of it, as well as a feeling of longing, condense into a kind of melancholia. This melancholia creates the film’s unique undertone. The storytelling is delicate and intuitive; the film, sensual and whole, flows forward leaving in the air a sense of mystery.

Vilja Hynynen