Film Review: Woman at War

By Alberto Sclaverano

“Dramedy” about extreme environmental activism helps us to reflect on what it really means to fight for social justice

The 2018 Icelandic-Ukrainian film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), made by Icelandic actor and director Benedikt Erlingsson, who also co-wrote and co-produced the movie, is an interesting exercise in mixing comedy, musical, and drama, in order to deliver a social message. 

After having premiered in the Critics’ Week section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, it was released later that year in Iceland and then via Video on Demand in the rest of the world. The story concerns a woman, Halla (played by Icelandic actress and musician Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), who is a choir director and, in her private life, a radical eco-activist (lots of people would call her simply an eco-terrorist) who plans to sabotage a Rio Tinto (a large British multinational company) aluminum plant that, according to her, has brought great damage to Iceland’s natural environment. 

But everything changes when Halla receives a call from an adoption agency about a request, made years before and forgotten, to adopt a Ukrainian orphan child. What follows is the portrayal of Halla in a specific, difficult moment of her life. She needs to find a way (and probably to choose a path) that brings together the desire of motherhood, especially considering all the delicacy and attention that an orphan from another country requires, and her (often dangerous) social activism. 

Halla also has a twin sister, Ása (played by the same actress), who is about to live for a long period in India, so she wants to concentrate on herself and on meditation. The two sisters are physically identical, yet their characters are very different: while Halla is always fighting for social justice and dreams of saving the Earth, to the point of acting illegally, Ása is way more interested in understanding herself better and in her own well-being. 

During the film, Halla clashes with the Icelandic government, which is trying to stop the activity of illegal groups of people like her. She arrives at the point of directly attacking electric pylons in order to cut off energy from plants like the one owned by Rio Tinto, and thus risks being arrested and charged for domestic terrorism.

The whole story is told in a way that combines sweet, almost satirical passages with more serious and tragic ones. But Erlingsson does not see the genre-mixing aspect in those two. In fact, Woman at War features musical-like sequences in which three Icelandic musicians, authors of the movie soundtrack, and three Ukrainian traditional singers interrupt the plot and accompany/enrich it with choral interludes, almost like in a traditional musical film. They appear each time in a different role, and start their music number for the joy (but also for the alienation) of the spectator. It’s a strange director and narrative choice, but in this film, it works surpassingly well.

So, what’s the meaning of Woman at War? It is certainly an exploration of a woman's solitary crusade to protect her country from the menace posed by multinational corporations and their desire to over-exploit natural resources. But it is also a reflection on the dangers that a certain type of “extreme activism” can create to a person’s life, and, by extension, to the people that he or she cares about most.