Last updated on June 10, 2025
A film by Hlynur Pálmason
With: Saga Garðarsdóttir, Sverrir Gudnason, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, Þorgils Hlynsson, Grímur Hlynsson, Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, Katla M. Þorgeirsdóttir, Kristinn Guðmundsson, Anders Mossling, Stephan Stephensen
Tenderly captures a year in the life of a family as the parents navigate their separation. Through both playful and heartfelt moments, the film portrays the bittersweet essence of faded love and shared memories amidst the changing seasons.
Our rate: ***
The director of Godland returns with a unique project that is poetic, personal, intriguing from start to finish, Scandinavian, eclectic, surprising, and astonishing. The challenge he has set himself raises questions from the very first images about the nature of what we are seeing. Singularity seems to prevail, time seems to stand still. The format is not that of a simple fiction; what is said is not necessarily conveyed through narration or action, but rather through transmitted states of mind, metaphorical images (the director inserts himself here and there into one of the characters, into their reflections), sensations that are transmitted to us, a reflection that has as much to do with psychoanalysis, observation of the world, redemption, and philosophy. Under its guise as an ecological, animal rights, artistic, and feminist manifesto, imbued with palpable sincerity, the film, in its wanderings, in its back-and-forth between land and sea, in its relationship to Iceland’s volcanic nature, in its dark portrayal of the family, speaks for itself, addressing the audience, but even more so, addressing a beloved woman to whom the director seems, in a filmed letter, to ask forgiveness, forgiveness for being a man, forgiveness for not having understood. An individual and collective forgiveness. A touching forgiveness.
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