Butterfly

Two estranged sisters reunite in Gran Canaria after their parents’ deaths, only to inherit an unfinished resort and esoteric retreat. Through the strange and the sincere, Itonje Søimer Guttormsen explores the stories we construct about ourselves and the ones we avoid.

We are always happy to welcome back long-standing friends of IFFR. Five years ago, we proudly featured Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s fiction debut Gritt (2021) in the Tiger Competition, from where it travelled widely and was celebrated as one of that year’s major discoveries. She now returns with her second feature, Butterfly, another journey into an unusual mindscape. This time, we follow two sisters who, after their parents’ death, return to their childhood home in a Gran Canaria charter resort, where events take an unexpected turn toward the esoteric.

Butterfly turns its attention to one of contemporary culture’s persistent habits: talking nonsense about ourselves, inventing images and narratives of our lives and even our pasts that may be fanciful at best and often hollow. As the sisters move through this landscape, Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby shape performances that feel muscular and frail at the same time, perfectly attuned to the film’s shifting emotional terrain. True to form, Guttormsen finds humour within darker currents, teasing out the vanity, absurdity and everyday strangeness that shape the stories we tell about who we are.

– Vanja Kaludjercic