Woman at War

Benedikt Erlingsson (2019, Iceland, 101 min.)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) October 2018 report warns that we are approaching an irreversible 1.5 – 2°C increase in global temperature (or worse), with far-reaching implications for climate refugees, risks to food security, greater sea levels, and more. And this report and others like it may be conservative. Curbing carbon emissions is critical to prevent irreversible damage to human society. Failure to act will be catastrophic. But act how? And to what extent?  

Benedikt Erlingsson’s comedic thriller Woman at War addresses these very existential questions. Halla, a fifty-year-old Icelandic woman, leads a secret double life. In public, Halla leads a choir, does yoga, and dreams of having a child of her own. Privately, “The Woman of the Mountain” commits acts of industrial-sabotage against the aluminum industry taking advantage of cheap electricity in Iceland. But when her application to adopt a child from Ukraine unexpectedly comes through, Halla faces a dilemma: if she keeps up her campaign in order to prevent greenhouse gas emissions that threaten an entire future generation of children, will she risk losing the chance to keep a child of her own? Confronting the personal versus political, morality versus desire, local versus global, this beautiful and quirky film provokes many questions with few easy answers. 

Just your standard Icelandic-Ukranian film about a choir director turned eco-terrorist–you know, that same old film you’ve seen from Hollywood 100 times already!