Until the other day, I was unfamiliar with the work of Rob Tregenza, a Kansas-born, UCLA-educated filmmaker who has written, directed, and photographed five pictures. Reviewing the first, Talking to Strangers (1988), which was shot in Baltimore, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that it “consists of only nine shots, each a ten-minute take. Each shot features the same character …whose identity appears to shift somewhat from one sequence to the next … in the first and last shots he is alone, and in the seven intervening sequences — the order of which was determined at random — he encounters one or more strangers,” including a Catholic priest and a “nihilistic thug.”

In short, not exactly your typical commercial Hollywood picture. Tregenza’s later films have been equally offbeat. In The Arc (1991),” an out-of-work welder goes on a cross-country road trip and meets odd people.” Inside/Out (1997), according to the New York Times, is about “a French artist who has been committed to a mental institution in the United States,” where “the patients … attempt to interact despite the emotional distance between them.” And in Gavagai (2016), “a grieving husband whose wife had been translating [Norwegian writer Tarjei] Vesaas’ poems into Chinese before her death … travels to Telemark, Vesaas’ home turf, partly in the hopes of finding a fitting resting place, and partly in an attempt to come to terms with his grief.”
Emotional distance; clergy; snow; minimal plot and dialogue; long takes: these are some of the recurring elements in Tregenza’s oeuvre. So it is in his striking new film, The Fishing Place, which is set during the Nazi occupation in a small Telemark town, whose inhabitants include the local Lutheran pastor (Andreas Lust), a German who used to be a Roman Catholic priest; the local doctor (Ola Otnes); Hansen, the local Nazi (Frode Winther); Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), a young woman who’s come to town to work in the home of the elderly Margit (Gjertrud L. Jynge), a former actres...