Sweden’s third-largest grossing film went on to scoop a pile of awards in Europe and secure an Oscar nod in 2005. As It Is In Heaven, a sweet tale of personal courage, treads well-known themes when an internationally renowned conductor crashes headlong into ill-health. Given less than a year to live, he drops his career and heads to the village of his childhood. He’s immediately seconded by a local minister to run the church choir and in doing so, upsets nearly everyone: old wounds fester, new ones open up. If this sounds like so many parables that have come before, that’s because it is.

Pollak’s appealing film wants for the grist of surprise. Recognisable threads emerge as the conductor forms a relationship with a beautiful singer and gets both the minister and a violent husband offside. Yet as the group grows more cohesive behind his direction, its numbers swell. Pollak is seldom far from his Dead Poet’s moment when the choir rise in support of their beleaguered saviour. Before long, they’ve entered a pan-European contest and have a shot at the big prize.

As It Is In Heaven is an undeniable charmer with power to seduce the coldest heart. Pollak has mapped his characters in a real, rather than caricatured, world and the attractive cast rise to his challenge. It helps distract from severe lapses of internal logic (the conductor’s physicality for one), such that as each of the principle’s find courage to overcome their problems, Pollak delivers on his promise of an uplifting, if familiar, couple of hours in the cinema.

// COLIN FRASER