The Enigma

At the age of nine, Knut Hamsun was turned over to his strict religious uncle in return for his parents debt. Six years later, he left his childhood home in Nordland and started a journey filled with self-denial and triumphs, humiliation and arrogance, love and contempt, intoxication and bitterness, flowers and blood. We follow Hamsun through his years as a wandering peddler and starving poet and we are with him during his triumphs and victories. We are there when he seduces his women and bewitches his audiences, when he meets his bride Marie and when he accepts the Nobel Prize. When we at last take our leave from Knut Hamsun, he is at Norholm, ruined and despised. What is it that forms a man, for better or worse, and what drove Knut Hamsun to make the decisions he did? The Enigma provides no answers, but shows us the many aspects of his life. (Norsk Filminstitutt)