Ivalu (2023)
★★ — Ivalu (2023)
Short films occupy an odd corner of cinema. They are too brief for the multiplex and too serious for YouTube, yet they carry entire worlds in miniature. Ivalu is a case in point: a sixteen-minute drama produced by M&M Productions and co-directed by Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen, set against the enormous, indifferent landscape of Greenland. The film had a notable awards moment, receiving an Oscar nomination in the short film category, which brought a degree of international attention to a production that might otherwise have remained firmly within Nordic festival circuits. It is the kind of recognition that puts a short on the map without necessarily telling you anything about what watching it actually feels like.
The Greenlandic and Danish co-production context matters here. Denmark has a long tradition of producing spare, emotionally severe cinema (if you want to see how that sensibility plays out at feature length, the blog has covered a couple of examples, including Only God Forgives and Nymphomaniac: Vol. I). Walter brings prior experience with the short form, having won the Oscar for his earlier short film Helium, which makes this a second serious tilt at the same award. Jørgensen, a Greenlandic co-director, brings a cultural specificity to the material that is central to the film's texture and setting. The three lead performers, Mila Heilmann Kreutzmann, Nivi Larsen and Angunnguaq Larsen, are drawn from Greenlandic acting talent, lending the film an authenticity that would be difficult to achieve from the outside. The premise is stripped back: a young girl is missing, her little sister is desperate to find her, and the father is absent in spirit if not in body. The wild Greenlandic terrain looms over everything, and the film's visual language leans hard into that geography.
It is worth noting that Ivalu sits alongside a broader wave of short and feature-length films from the 2020s dealing with difficult subject matter through a poetic or non-linear visual register. Elsewhere on the blog you can find coverage of Tiger Stripes and Megdan: Between Water and Fire, both recent works that approach dark or complex themes through a similarly stylised lens. Ivalu belongs to that conversation, for better or worse.
A-Z World Movie Tour Greenland Apparently this was nominated for an Academy Award or an Oscar for short stories. One common theme now as I'm going through these countries is abuse. There are constantly films coming up about abuse. The weirdness of this short is that it's absolutely beautifully filmed, beautifully scored and overall could have gone lots of different ways. Missing sibling.... Horrible incestuous abuse. Can't really give this more than a 2*
It's a tension I keep running into on this A-Z World Movie Tour: a film can be genuinely beautiful to look at and listen to, and still leave you cold, or worse, uncomfortable in a way that no amount of cinematographic polish can soften. The subject matter here is not handled badly, exactly, but the gap between the film's aesthetic elegance and the brutality underneath it is a strange place to sit for sixteen minutes. I suspect this one will stay with me for the wrong reasons, and that is not entirely the film's fault. But it does make it very hard to recommend.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-06-23
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Ivalu (2023) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Denmark: Only God Forgives (2013) · Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013) · Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013) · Monos (2019)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
