24/15
A 6-year-old boy, Armando, is accused of crossing the border with his best friend in elementary school. Norway’s official entry for the Best International Feature Film category. In the 97th Academy Awards in 2025. Norwegian films usually have low international standards, but here is a film that manages to meet extremely low Norwegian standards. It is a truly rare feat. For the most part, the film looks like it was made by first-year film school students. These students set out to make an experimental film that had never been seen before, and they succeeded. However, a few things were forgotten. Among other things, they forgot that even bad film scripts have some tricks, how to keep the audience hooked until the end with some cliffhangers or other cinematic techniques. This film doesn’t have any of those. It’s just extremely bad. It is also, without a doubt, the cheapest film ever made. The cost is just for the actors, camera, lighting, and sound crew, and no one is technically challenged in any scene. If you’re strong enough to hold a camera and a microphone, you can make this movie. The movie takes place entirely in the hallways and rooms of a school. They didn’t even bother with the supplies. It’s a school, a county-run school, and it was probably loaned out for free. The actors don’t exactly do bad work. But it’s hard for actors to do particularly bad work—it takes an extremely bad director to make actors look bad. So, strictly speaking, it’s not the actors’ fault that the movie is terrible. However, since they agreed to take on the roles, their credits will include Armand. The movie can’t be given a 0, but if it is, it deserves it. 0 simply because it doesn’t deserve a 1. By the way, this is Norway’s contribution to this year’s Oscars. The Norwegian Oscar committee has decided that this is the best film in Norway this year. How they came to this conclusion is a mystery, considering there have been quite a few bad Norwegian films this year, but Armands is the worst. There are plenty of bad Norwegian films to choose from that are much better than this one. For those who don’t know, Norway has no major international players. By comparison, Sweden and Denmark both have dozens. By traveling to the US and being nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film category, this film proves to the entire film industry that Norway is, in many practical ways, a nation without a functioning film industry.