“Until the Light Takes Us” Documentarians Expose the Beauty of Norway

"Norway is kind of like Zardoz," filmmaker Audrey Ewell told Noisecreep about the country where she and her partner Aaron Aites filmed their black metal documentary, 'Until the Light Takes Us.'

Ewell is referencing a sci-fi film about post-apocalyptic life on Earth. While many metalheads are fans of music that comes from the region, not many get to visit the vast country. Aites and Ewell provide a glimpse with their film. "Only you never see the people working outside the Utopian city, but that's because in Norway, they don't seem to exist. Everyone has health coverage. Everyone is educated and literate. Life is pretty good for them."

Aites and Ewell traveled to Norway to investigate the current state of the black metal musicians who torched medieval churches and wound up murdering one another in the early 1990s. Despite that dark period in the country's cultural history, the filmmaking pair found the Scandinavian country to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Ewell also told Noisecreep, "It's just incredibly beautiful everywhere: mountains, forests, cities, villages, fjords, you name it. It's clean. There is a strong sense of national pride there. The police dogs wear little blue boots and the cops don't carry guns. In the summer, people meet their friends at bars and sing their way home, arms linked at four in the morning, under and azure sky. In the winter, people huddle around in bars and talk, and silently trudge home, shoulders stooped forward against the wind and snow, at four AM, under a black sky."

While the Aites and Ewell had a lovely experience in Norway, it looked as though one of their main subjects, Varg Vikernes, who is incarcerated for murdering Euronymous of Mayhem, has it "pretty good" while on lockdown behind bars. "Confinement is never nice," Aites told Noisecreep. "Obviously, the prison system in Norway is not the horrifying, barbaric industry that it is in the U.S., but it certainly isn't 'nice' for him to be in prison. The Norwegians take the idea of rehabilitation seriously. Their goal is to re-introduce people into society. That is not the goal of the U.S. prison system." We'll have to see if Norway's 'rehabilitation' philosophy works, as Vikernes is scheduled to be released on parole after serving 16 years of his 21-year sentence.