a short film by Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen and Jan Dalchow
2002 | 17 mins | Norway
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a controversial work addressing the legal age of consent
Never afraid to court controversy, the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival programme of 2003 included this unsettling work from Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen and Jan Dalchow.
For this is the story of a teenage boy who has underage sex with a man more than twice his age, with devastating consequences. Yet what makes this work of note, is that it is based on fact and the infamous 1997 Norwegian trial of a man in his thirties who was convicted of having illegal sex with a fifteen-year-old.
Yet things are not always as black and white as what they may at first appear. For what sounds like a work on the unnerving subject of paedophilia, is actually a film that addresses the legal age of consent. It is a case that is further complicated here by the boy and not the man, having made the initial contact, with the sex act itself being consensual for both parties.
To that end, Even Rasmussen as Per the man and Tord Vandvik Haugen as Olav the boy depict with an all too graphic realism the reality of underage sex. The result is a thought-provoking piece, one that poses the question of exactly when does a child become an adult? That such an issue cannot help but provoke strong reactions, goes without saying and yet as this case would detail, the boy in question was fifty-six days short of being classed as an adult and the legal age of consent of sixteen years in Norway. Uncomfortable viewing from a filmmaker with a point to make.
screened as part of the 17th London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2003
starring: Tord Vandvik Haugen, Even Rasmussen, Toril Martinussen, Wiggo Farberg
Never afraid to court controversy, the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival programme of 2003 included this unsettling work from Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen and Jan Dalchow.
