Angela : 'Love Comes Quietly...'

Summary

‘Age is not better, hardly as well qualified to be an instructor of youth, for it has not profited as much as it has lost.’ With these words by Thoreau, Nikolai van der Heyde ends his fascinating film about a Dutch boy and an American girl who try to live their own lives in the narrow-minded province of Friesland of the 1920s.

Harm-Wouter is a student who rebels against the bourgeois pettiness of his village, and is strongly influenced by the arrival of a young American girl, whose outlooks and behaviour are ahead of the times. When Ben, her rich ‘stepfather’, refuses to leave the village where he was once the black sheep, she packs up and starts walking south. Harm-Wouter decides to go with her but their ‘experiment in true living’ is spoiled by angry villagers who feel their own security is threatened.

A film with the style and atmosphere and magnificent shots of Friesland by the Swedish cameraman Jörgen Persson.