31/37
Armand, a six-year-old boy, is accused of breaking boundaries with his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official bid for the Oscar Award in the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films, as a rule, have a low international standard, but here we have a film that manages to reach an exceptionally low Norwegian standard. This is a truly rare achievement. Apparently, the film was mostly shot by first-year students of the cinematography faculty. These students decided to create an experimental film unlike anything seen before, and they succeeded. However, they forgot something. Among other things, they forgot that even in bad films, there are usually some tricks in the script that allow you to keep the interest of the audience until the very end, some exciting moments or other cinematic techniques. There is nothing similar in this film. It’s just extremely bad. This is undoubtedly the cheapest film ever made. Expenses are limited to actors, camera, light and sound equipment, and no one has any technical problems in any wall. If you are strong enough to hold a camera and microphone, you could make this movie. The action of the film takes place entirely in the corridors and classrooms of the school. They didn’t even bother to install the decorations. It’s a school, a county-run school, and most likely they took it for free. Actors play well, but it’s hard for actors to play badly: in order for actors to look bad, an exceptionally bad director is needed. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the film is terrible. However, since they agreed to play these roles, in the future their participation in the film “Arman” will be indicated in their service record. It is impossible to rate the film 0, but if it were possible, it would deserve 0 simply because it does not deserve 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s “Oscar”. The Norwegian Oscar Committee decided that this is the best film shot in Norway this year. How they came to such a conclusion is a mystery, given that there were many bad Norwegian films released this year, but “Arman” is the worst of them. There are many bad Norwegian films that are much better than this one. For those who don’t know, there are no international players in Norway. For comparison, there are several dozen of them in Sweden and Denmark. This film, shown in the USA and nominated for an Oscar in the category “Best Foreign Film”, clearly demonstrates to the entire film industry that Norway is, for many practical reasons, a country without a functioning film environment.
