Weightless

The ugliest flower in the bouquet. This is how the beautiful singer Kari Iverland felt when she stopped eating, in her early twenties. Now, eighteen years later, she smiles all the time at the things she used to think, but it is an awkward smile. When she sings about the feelings she had in that period, while recording her album VEKTLØS / WEIGHTLESS - the thread through the documentary – she reveals her true face. Between recordings, documentary filmmaker Sigve Endresen takes her back to the places from the time she suffered from anorexia nervosa. She revives old memories with her mother and her psychiatrist, holds up old photographs of a gorgeous young woman (‘this is how I looked’) next to an angular drawing with lots of thick red and black stripes (‘and this is how I felt inside’). Gradually, it becomes clear that Kari’s parents, as missionaries in a poor country, hardly had time for her when she was a child. Self-sacrifice was the norm. Because her best friend had nothing to eat, Kari was unable to get any food down. She felt unimportant, superfluous and guilty. At a later age, back in Norway, she also lost her younger brother Endre, who died in a plane accident. And yet, VEKTLØS is not a depressing film, but a warm, intimate story about the importance of self-respect, interspersed with sensitive songs.