As It Is In Heaven Dvd

What You Actually Get With the As It Is In Heaven Dvd

The film is a 2001 Swedish drama directed by Kay Pollak, starring Michael Nyqvist as a struggling violinist who returns to a small northern town and builds a choir. It was Sweden's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and it won. The runtime is roughly 149 minutes with dialogue primarily in Swedish, so any physical disc you buy needs subtitles unless it's a very rare dubbed version. I picked up the Criterion Collection release a few years back after comparing a handful of used listings. Here's what matters in practice.

As It Is In Heaven Dvd – Where to Find It and What to Watch For

Criterion released this on DVD as part of their catalog. That version carries Region 1 coding, which means it will only play on North American DVD players or multi-region setups. If you're in Europe or elsewhere and grab that disc without checking the player compatibility, you'll get a solid block of colored noise and a spinning disc for about forty seconds before the tray pops open automatically. Happened to me once at a friend's place. I ended up burning an ISO from the disc onto my own media server and using VLC with region unlocking via regionset tooling. Took about twelve minutes total. The Criterion edition includes an audio commentary by film scholar Peter von Bagh. It's worth listening to if you want to understand the musical staging choices. The other notable extra is a short featurette on the choir recording process, which runs about nine minutes. There's no making-of documentary, no theatrical trailer, and no deleted scenes. That's normal for Criterion's older catalog releases. You can usually find this DVD on sites like Amazon, eBay, and platforms. New old stock copies run anywhere from fifteen to forty dollars depending on region and seller. Used copies in decent condition go for eight to twenty dollars. Avoid any listing that doesn't show actual disc photos because Criterion cases use a specific spine design and the discs themselves have the Criterion etching on the clear hub ring. Fake or mislabeled copies show up occasionally on auction sites.

Playback and Quality Notes

The video transfer is 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, 16mm grain structure preserved reasonably well for a digitally intermediate-finaled film. Colors lean slightly warm, which is consistent with the Swedish light palette Pollak was going for. There are no reported macroblocking issues on properly pressed copies, but I've seen a few budget re-presses from non-Criterion distributors that compress the dark interior scenes enough to make the choir costumes look muddy. Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo. The score by Johannes Kallion and the live choir performances carry most of the dynamic range, and they sit forward in the mix. Dialogue occasionally gets buried during ensemble numbers, which is by design rather than a technical flaw. If you're watching with headphones you might want to adjust yourTV or receiver's audio delay to avoid lip sync drift. That happened on my older Samsung set and required about three seconds of manual adjustment. The subtitle track is soft-coded, meaning you select it from the player menu. There's no forced subtitle option for the Swedish portions since the entire film is in Swedish, which simplifies things compared to bilingual productions where you need to toggle between languages frequently.

Common Pitfalls When Buying Physical Copies

Region coding is the main one. Many international buyers accidentally order Region 1 when they actually need Region 2, which is the standard PAL format used across most of Europe, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia. The two regions are not cross-compatible on single-region players. Check your player's region code before purchasing. Another issue is disc surface scratches. I once bought a used copy online that looked pristine from the listing photos. When it arrived, the playback froze during the final choir performance at roughly the 138-minute mark. The scratch was radial and only caught during that section's intense bass frequencies. I cleaned it with a microfiber cloth and a drop of distilled water, which resolved about eighty percent of the stutter. The remaining five seconds of freeze I worked around by using a frame-accurate skip function on my player.

Is There a Better Alternative?

If you're in a region where importing a Region 1 DVD is inconvenient, streaming platforms occasionally rotate this title in and out of their libraries. The film has appeared on HBO Max at various points and sometimes surfaces on Kanopy through library partnerships. Availability shifts frequently, so checking JustWatch before making a purchase decision will save you time. I keep my Criterion DVD anyway because streaming licensing can disappear without warning, and owning the disc guarantees access regardless of platform decisions.