Every year, European Film Promotion (EFP) select ten outstanding young directors and screen their films at the Karlovy-Vary Film Festival, following which we are lucky enough to host the films here on T-Port for our Professional Subscribers.
Anna Maria Joakimsdottir-Hutri’s WHO STANDS UP FOR ALVAR is a piece that explores the life of a woman who straddles the busy roles of mother and carer. In this interview she explores the motivation for telling this story, and why a positive attitude has got her through to now.
Hi Anna Maria! Tell us about yourself
I’m a woman filmmaker that took some years off to tend to family duties. Since my kids are growing up to be independent human beings I can focus more on my career again.
At the moment I have made a short that works as a proof of concept for my feature film project about a sub-nurse within elderly care that eventually just has enough and decides to do something about the infernal workload and the undignified life situation of so many lonely elderly people in the northern hemisphere society.
The project is called “Who stands up for Alvar” I have received initial funding of about 35000 euro and am currently looking for co-producers.
Tell Us More About Your Film
The working title is “Who stands up for Alvar?” and it is about a sub-nurse Minna (41y) who balances her private family obligations to her ice-skating elite training daughter (15y) with her time consuming job at the home care service in the elderly care unit. And her dedication doesn’t rest with that as she rescues one of her neighbours from an apartment fire. He is an old grumpy lonely man in the last stages of cancer. And as nothing could add to this she finds the drunken handyman one night walking home from duty. He’s sleeping in the snow about to freeze to death and she helps him as well.
The story spans about one week where we meet all her clients: Alma the retired ballet dancer, Ernst the veteran with the horse he will have to put down, rich old people, poor old people, old drug addicts, homeless olds and mind you gangsters sometimes get old to.
Her work load accumulates to an absurd level and where in the end her daughter is to compete for being chosen to the Olympic team. Minna tries to manage everything – until it just all falls apart and she needs to do something about it all.
It is about empathy and the exploitation of it, it is about civil courage and agency in having had enough and doing something rebellious about it. It is about motherly love and fellow human care – but most of all it is a hero story about the battlefields of women’s everyday life.
What were the biggest challenges you encountered during making your film? How do you view them now?
The funding process – getting industry to believe in a female director is at least for me proven to be extremely challenging.
Tell us three things you learned from the process of making your film
I think of challenges as the reason for why I chose this field of work. I love them and love to solve them in constructive ways together with the team. I always know that if I don’t have a solution somebody else will and it is all about letting the team flower to bring out everyone’s best.
What do you love most about your film?
The actors’ sensitivity. The actors’ creativity is always in the end the reason why there is an audience to the films I make.
Do you feel that you understand film distribution? What do you wish you’d known before you started the process?
I’d like to know how distribution could be involved in an early stage to create the space for a great movie.
Do you have any fears for the future of the film industry? If so what are they?
No I harbour no fear – during the years I have realised only positive thinking moves things forward. The fear we have as humans is rather the healthy humble attitude to be open to the unknown and surprise – cause it’s always present.
If you could make one change to the film industry as it stands now, what would it be?
The structural nurture of female filmmakers. We are usually the only caregivers to our children and we would need security and stability of employment to be able to develop as artists / filmmakers in comparison to my male colleagues who can rely on getting those calls saying “hey, come on board this all ready developed project and do your directing magic to it.” Women just rarely get those calls. My political provocation would be “Steady minimum income for female directors.
Is there anything else you would like to mention?
I have other feature screenplays too. One biopic about a post punk boy band in the 90-ies Swedish music scene, one fantasy story about the underworld, one dance movie about an Iranian girl opening a disco for her friends but gets caught and needs to flee, one epoch about the west coast piracy that was approved by the Swedish king in the turn of the 1700-th century, one about the 60-ies forestry industry and brotherly envy… yes I have other stories to.
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