Stranger things

“Miraklet i Gullspång” (The Miracle in Gullspång) is a somewhat peculiar Swedish documentary, directed by Maria Fredriksson. It was released last year and won a couple of awards. Recently, the public service network SVT made it more widely available. Interestingly, the critics are not so amused this time around, and it´s possible that the docu was overhyped at its initial release. It´s dragging, raises more questions than it answers, and ends with a weird cliff-hanger. However, it seems to be tolerably popular among ordinary TV viewers. I even encountered a couple just the other day who discussed it on the metro! Another problem with “Miraklet i Gullspång” is that the director snaps at one point and starts reaming out the people she is interviewing, while the camera is still rolling. Major cringe, if you ask me. Some people also wonder whether the “documentary” is really scripted and hence sheer fiction.

The story, such as it is, revolves around two Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. To simplify somewhat, both live in Gullspång in Sweden. The sisters are Christians and see miraculous signs all around them. During a visit to a real estate broker named Olaug, they realize that she looks like a copy of their long lost sister Lita, who committed suicide about 30 years earlier?! DNA tests show that Olaug indeed is the half-sister of Kari and May. Some searches in the Norwegian archives seem to confirm that Olaug is Lita´s identical twin. The two sisters were separated at birth in 1941, during the German occupation of Norway, supposedly for fear that they would be abducted by crazy Nazi race scientists who conducted experiments on twins.

Olaug soon starts questioning the official story that Lita killed herself. First, she theorizes based on the police report that Lita died of natural causes, perhaps a drowning accident. This endears her to Kari and May, who apparently believed that Lita´s immortal soul went straight to Hell due to her suicide. Soon, however, Olaug starts to suspect that Lita was actually murdered. This is apparently too much for her new Christian family, who desperately want to be seen as socially respectable despite their poor rural background. Lita may or may not have been unfaithful, embezzled money, or perhaps exposed criminal activity at her work. Either way, Kari and May want Olaug to stop prying into Lita´s fate. It also turns out that Olaug grew up in a privileged family, has served in the military, has a very high IQ and is an atheist. The social and philosophical distance between her and her sisters is just too great.

At this point, the story takes a sensational turn. Olaug makes a new DNA test, and this time the result indicates that she is *not* related in any way to Kari and May (and hence not Lita). It´s at this point that the director loses her temper and starts screaming! It´s perfectly possible that Olaug manipulated the second DNA test to get the other sisters off her back, since they refused to cooperate with her on investigating Lita´s possible murder. At the very end of the docu, Olaug asks *the director* to make a DNA test with the words “I think we may be related”. Nobody knows what the line means, and Maria Fredriksson refuses to say. It certainly sounds as if Olaug might be a confidence trickster. Has she manipulated Kari and May into thinking that she is their unknown sister? Since Olaug hasn´t sued Swedish TV, I assume the real meaning of her parting words is something else, or deliberately shrouded in mystery.

As already indicated, I don´t think “Miraklet i Gullspång” is ultimately *that* interesting, and I can understand that some suspect the whole thing to be scripted. After all, all the expected plot elements are there: Nazi medical experiments, twins separated at birth, doppelgängers, a murder mystery, even seemingly paranormal events (like when the director narrowly escapes being hit by a falling lamp during an interview, apparently “warned” by forces unknown). True miracle? Or miraculous script? I suppose we have to wait a couple of more years to find out…