“Northfork”–A film of European sensibility–Elegaic Fable of longing, loss, faith and re-awakening

When I first met my sweetheart Daniel Holland, we started watching movies by theme and one theme was angels. “Wings of Desire” is one of my favorite movies. Ebert quite rightly compares “Northfork” to it.

This movie, now four years old, is out on DVD through Paramount Classics with excellent extras:
“Bare-Knuckle Film-making,
The construction of Northfork,
24-frame news segment,
and photo gallery.

In a 2003 review posted on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert says of Northfork:

There has never been a movie quite like “Northfork,” but if you wanted to put it on a list, you would also include “Days of Heaven” and “Wings of Desire” It has the desolate open spaces of the first, the angels of the second, and the feeling in both of deep sadness and pity. The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, so open, that men must wonder if they have a role beneath such indifferent skies.

This was a heroic effort of film-making by a family team of brother and father, that managed to get made even after the promised funding pulled out. I agree with Ebert, that it is a “visionary epic.” I’m glad they kept up their courage and got it made.