Human Nature
Director Bart Schrijver (The North) allows us to follow 30-year-old Sophie’s 500-kilometre hike through the Arctic region of Norway, in search of ultimate silence and tranquillity.
The North (2025) was one of the most striking arthouse hits of the past season: a film made on a minimal budget and without any funding, for which the filmmakers walked three hundred kilometres across Scotland. The film was praised in The Guardian as the ‘ultimate hiking film’; a film that focuses on the act of hiking itself: nature, the weather and the hardships encountered along the way. The success of The North has prompted the cinema release of Schrijver’s earlier film Human Nature.
Schrijver’s debut film follows a thirty-year-old woman who wants to escape the pressures of work, study, friends and the constant feeling of having to measure up to her brothers and sisters. She sets off for one of Europe’s last true wildernesses. All she wants is to be alone and experience the grandeur of nature. But distancing herself from everyday life proves more difficult than she had expected.
Written by M.V.