Filmens hus

Every couple of months I take a wander down to Filmens hus (the Film House), home of the Norwegian Film Institute and Cinemateket, to pick up their bi-monthly programme and see what's on (much more fun than checking the listings online). There's also a DVD store, library and film museum in the building.

All of the mainstream cinemas in Oslo are owned by the same company, so it's very rare to see anything unusual in those theatres, and Cinemateket provides one of the few precious alternatives.

Cinemateket shows a wide variety of feature films, short films and documentaries. They usually focus on one or two actors or directors each month, sometimes they're Norwegian (Bent Hamer and Hans Petter Moland are my favourite Norwegian directors) but often they're international (this month there's a bunch of Robert Mitchum films, and not so long ago they delved deep into the work of Werner Herzog).

My favourite parts of the program, though, are the unannounced ones: every month they have free Norwegian films with English subtitles, and they don't tell you which film is playing until a week before, so that they can keep up with the latest and best new releases. It used to be a weekly feature, and most of the films I saw were very good, but it might have been spreading things a little thin to try and come up with a film a week in a country of just five million people.

They also do "troll i eske" (troll in a basket, or jack-in-the-box) films every month, and you don't know what you're about to see until the curtain goes up. Sometimes it's difficult with my extremely limited Norwegian - last month it was a Romanian film with Norwegian subtitles, but I got by - but often as not they're English-language films. Hopefully my Norwegian will everntually improve to the extent that I won't have to worry about getting a non-English-language troll i eske!