Incest and homocide
This is the topic of one of the strongest short movies - although it's not short at all, it's 94 minutes long - shown at the festival in Grimstad in Norway this year. Mitt elskede barn - My beloved child - is the story of a woman who killed her father, the man who had abused her for years. It is a story that is painfully familiar and old - but the documentary is in itself so strong that it makes one of the larger newspapers in Norway spend whole pages on what is basically a student production from Volda College.

It's not a happy story with a happy ending. The woman who is in the center of the movie is in prison, she sees her son one hour every week, and she's pregnant with a child who will be born while she is in prison. When she comes out her son will be 13 and the child now in her belly will learn to talk, walk and live her first years without her mother. But the movie doesn't really focus on this, but on how child-abuse is closely connected to broken and ruined lives. 70-90% of all the women in prison in Norway have stories of sexual abuse from their childhoods, and in most cases the abuser gets more and better care and also enjoys more legal security than the abused child.

If our students have ever made a movie I hope will make a difference, this is it.