I made a film this past semester, and it was "Oslo, August 31st".
To clarify, I am not Joachim Trier, nor am I saying that he has plagiarized an idea that came from me. How could he, after all, since the film played Un Certain Regard last year, as well as won Best Film and Cinematography prizes at the Stockholm Film Festival that same year. If anything, I plagiarized an idea off of Trier's film, however quite inadvertently so. I am certainly not saying that the fact that I made a film similar in meaning has diminished "Oslo, August 31st" at all in my eyes. I barely made the film I made at all, barely getting it done in a month's time. It was an 5-minute long afterthought, and even at its end felt incomplete.
So I owe a great debt to Trier, not only for giving the story I meant to tell a proper representation, but raising the bar for me to tackle once more in post-production. It also gives me a particular challenge in avoiding too close relation to the film itself, whose form actually proves quite stimulating. Opening to a fantastically constructed travelogue including memories of Oslo, as well as the people there, we don't truly get an impression of who or what this film is going to focus in on. We're not at all certain if the people or experiences of that opening will bare greater significance on the story later on, and indeed they don't.
