Church Film Prize of the INTERFILM Jury, Luebeck 2002

Thou shalt not kill. Can a jury devoted as fully to the message of the gospels as to aesthetic criteria award its prize to a film whose leading woman is selfish, power-hungry, and possibly a murderess? It can, if that figure is as ambivalent as Gudmundsson’s Freya. This provocative beauty is a patroness of the marginalised and the maltreated, holding a mirror that reflects, as through a glass darkly, the hypocrisy of a society whose Christianity does not extend to opening its doors for drunkards and sinners.