Jon Fosse is a renowned Norwegian writer and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate in 2023 "For innovative plays and prose that give voice to the inexpressible," laureate of the Nordic Council Prize and the theatrical equivalent of the Nobel — the International Ibsen Award, nominee for the International Booker Prize in 2020 and 2022. "For my plays, it is better when the characters' emotions are closed under a tight lid — and under this lid, they boil." Artist Asle lives in Dylgja. Mostly, he only communicates with his neighbor, a bachelor fisherman Asleik. Occasionally, he talks to another artist suffering from alcohol addiction, who is also named Asle. Both Asles are friends and in some sense represent two versions of the same life. On Christmas Eve, one finds the other in a snowdrift. Saving his comrade from a cold death, the hero recalls the past and begins to see friendship, faith, and creativity in a new light. "...I try to see why I actually continue to paint pictures, and increasingly immerse myself in what I see, in what is perhaps bigger than life, only there is no suitable way to express it in words..." "Something lives in the painting and silently speaks from it, sometimes one brushstroke is enough — and the painting begins to speak..."