Pål Gerhard Olsen

Just Say Something

Landscape gardener Vidar Skauge is past his prime. He has lost his wife from cancer and is tormented by the thought that he has not managed to carry out what he ought to have achieved. One day he visits the National Gallery and notices a teenage lad who is completely absorbed in a relatively insignificant landscape painting. The lad is an Armenian refugee from Iraq who has chosen silence as a strategy to combat Norway’s ‘caring society’. His meeting with the lad and the psychiatrist who treats him accelerates a process of self-awareness which, in the course of a few autumn months, leads to a transformation of Vidar’s internal landscape.

Just say a word is a sensitive male portrait, a story of repression and obscuring of the past, of the joys of reading and physical work, and no small hymn of praise to Oslo as a green city.