The New Yorker:

With a style as daring as his narrative sense, Rob Tregenza dramatizes the moral dilemmas of Norwegians under Nazi occupation.

By Richard Brody

The best filmmakers, looking to the past, see the future. The Holocaust and the Nazi menace to Europe have been filmmakers’ mainstays for decades, and sometimes the effort (whether more or less artistically accomplished) to depict the historical horrors of the extreme right has also served as an X-ray revealing hidden authoritarian or nationalistic infections in ostensibly democratic politics. An extraordinary new film, “The Fishing Place,” by the veteran American independent filmmaker Rob Tregenza, confronts the Nazi onslaught during the Second World War by means of a daring aesthetic and a refined narrative sensibility that are utterly distinctive—and with a bold twist that overtly wrenches the subject into the present tense.

Tregenza has been making films for nearly forty years. His first feature, “Talking to Strangers,” premièred in 1988, but “The Fishing Place,” which opens Feb. 6, at moma, is only his fifth. Tregenza always does his own cinematography, and his style is entirely his own, involving extended and elaborate camera moves on dollies, cranes, cars, or even boats. (He uses a crane as freely as an artist wields a paintbrush.) Like his previous film, “Gavagai,” from 2016, “The Fishing Place” is filmed and set in Norway, but whereas the former took place in the present day, the new one is a historical drama, set in a remote village in Telemark, amid the country’s occupation by Nazi Germany. It’s centered on a woman named Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), who arrives in town and serves as a housekeeper for a businessman named Klaus (Eindride Eidsvold). Her presence is no accident: previously arrested by the Nazis, she has been released under the supervision of a local Norwegian S.S. officer, Hansen (Frode Winther), who then orders her to keep house for—and to spy on—a recently arrived priest (Andreas Lust), a German émigré whose politics Hansen finds suspicious.

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