The Other Side of Sunday

Each Sunday at five minutes to eleven, the vicars young daughter sits in church. She has calculated that by the time of her confirmation, she will have spent 640 hours in the uncomfortable, wooden pew. She feels trapped in the joyless, enforced Christian atmosphere that permeated Norway in the fifties. Maria (Marie Theisen) longs for life outside this prison. She wants to become something different than the church hags; the lumpy masses of grey, joyless women in hats and shapeless coats that occupy the pews behind the vicars family in the church. She wants to be like the other kind of women around the county, the kind with perky breasts and sinful bodies, that wont get into heaven. She wants to live! Through her friendship with Mrs. Tunheim (Hildegun Riise), an elder of the church and the only woman among the congregation who seems vital and alive; a proud and lovely woman who admits to her own body, Maria is given the strength to disobey her strict father and the congregation, and strike out on her own. Marias path leads her away from the church hags and towards the youth of the fifties. With a group of youngsters, she sneaks off on trips to the cottage and other forbidden adventures, to discover a dizzying puberty.

The Other Side of Sunday is a film full of humor and warmth, but the meetings between the sexes are not always romantic. According to the moral code of those times, this is not only sinful, but unclean and bound to lead straight to hell! (Norsk Filminstitutt)