A Festival That Teaches Us to Understand the World – Commentary by Trygve Lundemo
This is a commentary written by Trygve Lundemo and reflects his personal experiences and perspectives.
The world is on fire. Powerful men want more power, and innocent people are dying across several parts of the world. That is why we need Kosmorama.
(Still image from the Lebanese film A Sad and Beautiful World)
“See the world from multiple perspectives” is the motto of the Kosmorama Trondheim International Film Festival. Rarely has a motto fit the times we are living in better. The United States and Israel attacked Iran two days before the festival opened. There is still war in the Gaza Strip and in Ukraine. More than 150,000 people have so far been killed in the civil war in Sudan. More than twelve million people are displaced there alone. Donald Trump wants to take over Greenland.
The rest of us sit helplessly on the sidelines, not knowing what we can do. The world is hardly recognizable. Many people are afraid.
That is when it feels good to go to Kosmorama. There we can watch films from all over the world. We can immerse ourselves in Arab love stories and the struggle for survival in Georgia. We can see and hear the story of Marianne Faithfull and Swinging London in the 1960s (Broken English).
We can watch a powerful Swedish-Norwegian story about a father and a son (Portrait of a Confused Father), or try to imagine life under communism in Poland in the early 1980s (Kieślowski films are being shown in a retrospective). We gain insight into life in Chile, Tunisia, Iraq, Argentina, Japan, Iran, Germany, Italy, and many other countries. I have seen some of these films. Most of them are very well made and worth watching. Quality is clearly an important keyword for Kosmorama.
Still image from the fra den Iraqi film The President's Cake
The festival truly lives up to its motto, “See the world from multiple perspectives.” We don’t see much of Tom Cruise, nor do we get yet another wave of films about Norway during the Second World War—but audiences are showing up. In droves. Kosmorama is on track to set a new attendance record in 2026.
There are likely many reasons for that. One of them may be that audiences—in a very turbulent time—are interested in understanding more about the world. That may be the most encouraging thing of all.
What I myself have come to understand, aside from the perfectly reasonable irritation that many screenings are sold out, is that we humans have a lot in common, no matter where we live.
We differ in many ways. We have different temperaments, different ways of living, and different living conditions. We live in countries with very different systems of government. There is a big difference between the Italian president in La Grazia and the young female sex workers in the American film Fucktoys, yet they still share the same basic needs as the rest of us.
Still image from the Iranian film A Fox Under a Pink Moon.
We want to be seen, we want to be loved, we want to feel a sense of belonging with others. We want to live decent lives. Kosmorama teaches us to understand the families who lose a loved one in Ukraine, the parents who lose their children in Gaza, Sudan, and Iran.
They live far away. Some live very far away, yet we share much in common with them. We understand this, we experience it, through the people we meet in the films at Kosmorama.
Film, like many other forms of cultural expression, teaches us compassion. That is always needed—especially in a time when the world is more unsettled than it has been in a very long time.
I look forward to the rest of the festival, all the way through Sunday evening. The key is to plan early which films you want to see, because screenings sell out quickly. And that’s something to be glad about—both for the organizers and because it means more people will gain a deeper understanding of the people around the world.
