1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I’m from Lofoten in arctic Norway and grew up in a small town that I hated then as much as I love it now. It was small and remote, so my teens were spent very much online. Film was always my biggest passion - hours and hours of my formative years in the 90s spent watching the film-only cable channel Filmnet. When I was 15 I got a small Sony Handycam small enough to put in a jacket pocket and I carried it around religiously and would film anything. During the big blog explosion in the early 2000s (when I read the blog of my current producer Andrew Grant!) I would devour all this amazing free writing, and just write write write myself (both scripts and analysis). At one point I started freaking out because all my thoughts about film were pure theory, and I jumped into a pretty intense bout of just making making making. None of the three-four films I tried making at that point actually got finished, but that wasn’t the point. I’d decided not to go to film school, and these attempts would be me figuring things out as I went along. After this I started attending writing and directing workshops and planning to make my first proper (as in finished!) short, which I did in 2010. And I’ve been making ‘em ever since :) 

2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

It’s based on a true story, so the first spark came from hearing about the incident: a young Syrian refugee had helped his fleeing family cross from one country to the next over his mobile phone from my home town of Svolvær in arctic Norway. It immediately sounded to me like the incident had the potential to become a film that could encapsulate many elements of the refugee experience, in a direct and very human way. The mobile-phone aspect interested me, as I’ve dealt with our relationship to technology in previous films. I thought it could become an emotional film about our current times (in fact the story was so contemporary that by the time we’d shot it, it was placed firmly in the past, as the specific route the family travels in the film was locked down by then).

I got in contact with the young man and we talked extensively about his experiences, and he gave his blessing for me to dramatize them. 

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?

The biggest challenge was getting under the skin of experience that was so far removed from my own, that was mostly in a language I don’t speak, and I did my best to try to understand the story through all the wonderful Syrian collaborators on the film that shared their own experiences with me: our fantastic lead actor Jawad Alkadhmani, his brother Aihm who plays the brother, Gaith Jacoub who cast the voices of the smugglers, my dear friend Eman Kamal Aldeen who plays the mother, translator Wessam Hachicho (who was of immense help in the help with the actors), and the extras in the language class (all actual students), who shared their stories.

Jawad had never acted before, but had an immense presence in front of the camera. To get to know each other and prepare, we got to hang out and workshop the film together in the week right before shooting, just the two of us. We ended up making the whole film, which I edited in time for the proper shoot, so it not only worked as preparation for me and Jawad but also really came in handy when it came to prepare the shots. 

It ended up being a very precise guide for the last half of the film in particular. The beats (and which beats to scrap), the energy and flow of the camera, the overall feel of the music and the way the intensity of emotion should grow, and not the least how our ironic “postcard” aesthetics would work. I had the idea to have these “postcard” scenes that would surreally juxtapose this Northern-Norwegian village with the names of other places, in a classic postcard aesthetic, as a way of getting under the skin of this bizarre, almost mystical situation where our main character feels like he’s everywhere at the same time as he’s completely stuck and alone at “the edge of the world”, and to juxtapose the idyll of his surroundings with his terrible situation. I wanted the postcards to constantly interrupt Whalid’s energy and flow, but wasn’t sure how that would work. Through the dummy version I gained confidence that it would.

The first part of the film called for so many different places and other characters that the dummy version was only the roughest guide to it, and didn’t really help much with the staging. When we shot the opening scene we went into a class room situation with only the barest of ideas of what to do, shooting it as a documentary with a few loose ideas about moments (like the language-learning game with words that have strong dramatic and poetic associations in the context of the story), but also being very open to what would happen on the spot. The use of the map was completely improvised and fit perfectly into the thematic threads of the film - so much that it quickly became an obvious way to open the film. 

My favorite part is probably editing, though it’s probably the part where I despair the most. Shooting can be a completely ecstatic for me and I love how it almost gives me a constant high for the time it lasts, but there’s something about the calmness of the editing phase, when the film is washing around in your head even as you’re doing other things than editing (similar to the writing process, but so much more concretely), when you’re living with the film in a calmer and more everyday way, that I just love. Editing while cooking. Editing while getting groceries. Editing while walking down the street. I like to edit over a long stretch of time, and not to rush things (on this one I also had a more intense week of editing with Trude Lirhus in the middle of the process). 

 4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

I’ve really enjoyed getting into King Hu’s work the last year. Great wuxia films. They have this wonderful restraint that sometimes feels Zen and other times feels like a spring-loaded mouse trap. And when the trap is sprung the restraint is exchanged for a wild cinematic creativity (often in an simple and naive Jean Cocteau-like way). At times they’re dreamy, abstract, subjective, but they’re also full of perfectly carved-out cinematic spaces (to make sure you know where danger might come from in the next fight). Lovely cinema. I recommend A Touch of Zen to see him in epic mode, and The Fate of Lee Khan to see him in chamber-play mode (Criterion has a great edition of the former, Eureka’s Masters of Cinema series have great editions of both).

5) What’s next for you?

I just finished the penultimate round of shooting on my first feature, Dyr & Dyr (Animals & Animals, very much still a working title), that I’ve been shooting on-off since last June. It’s another project that thematizes our digitally interconnected lives, and tries to get under the skin of a girl with apocalyptic nightmares who feels guilty for not changing herself and working more against all our multiple current impending dooms - who really wants to be a better person, but has some trouble seeing it through. A teaser can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/342981578

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