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| Ivalu |
At the very beginning of this Oscar-shortlisted short film. the title character, Ivalu, is missing. We follow her younger sister, Pipaluk (Mila Heilmann Kreutzmann) as she searches for her, guided by a crow, through all the places where they used to spend time together, in their small Greenland town and the surrounding wilderness. Eventually, she will discover the truth by making sense of her own memories. The film is adapted from Morten Dürr’s graphic novel. At a Q&A where he is joined by Mila as well as co-director Pipaluk K Jorgensen and producers Kim Magnusson and Rebecca Pruzan, director Anders Walter explains that he fell in love with the graphic novel as soon as he read it.
“I wanted to adapt it into a film,” he says. “And then the whole process of adapting the source material started and you know, trying to find your voice in something that already felt very fine tuned. I think the inspiration was really the way nature is used in this story. I think what taught me the most was the nature and how that could help tell the story and elevate it to something more creative.
“That was the kind of story I felt you could do here in Denmark, but by moving the story to Greenland, there was something that just felt more weighty again. And then nature could play a bigger part, and that was really what spoke to me the most besides, of course, the theme of the film, which is incest. And I find that very important, to be able to talk about a taboo like that, and talk about it in fiction.
“It felt like a challenge. And also, I mean, it's no secret that with Kim and Rebecca, it took quite some time for us to find the right people to work with in Greenland. And because obviously, it's a sensitive subject matter. We knew that very much from the beginning. And we also decided if we couldn't find people in Greenland who wanted to do the film with us, we didn't want to do it.
“Eventually, we got into a very constructive dialogue with Pipaluk Jorgensen and her production company called Polarama Greenland. And really, that's when it all started, because it was almost like restarting the project. Then [we started] the whole conversation about the screenplay and how to tell this story, to make it feel authentic, not only for me, but to make it feel authentic for the people that live in Greenland and, you know, strong voices like Pipaluk, who has been working also with the subject matters for many years. We tried to really stay open to dialogue and try to understand what the story means locally, and really being very gentle about the process.”
“At this point, in films, we really want to share Greenlandic stories as well,” says Pipaluk. “We have really a growing industry in Greenland now and want to tell our own stories, but this project came as a co-producing project, and we got involved. It was really important for us that we could make this a collaboration from the beginning.
“We talk so much about colonialism at this point now in Greenland as well, on how to tell stories. It was hard in the beginning, but we have many things in my company now. We are a production service, but we co-produced and I direct. The one thing is that we want to bring up a bigger industry. And with Anders, who has made so many great films, we want to be included in that and want to have the Greenlandic big crew on it. And they were willing to have how[ever] much of Greenland can we put into the film, not just in front, but behind the cameras, too, so that was something that we we really wanted to collaborate on.
“Now the story is out, and it's such a beautiful film. The cast was important too, with Mila, because this is a thing: we are only 58,000 people in the whole island of Greenland. We really wanted a strong lead, and I knew that Mila was one of those kids that has a really good support in her family to do this film. So yeah, we got involved in many stages, and in the end as co-director as well, because we thought it was important. Especially with the language. The language is Greenlandic, and it's something that is so sensitive, as well to be diverse... it was just more authentic that it will be in Greenlandic, and it's shot in Greenland and it’s a Greenlandic story, so of course.
“At some stage we had Covid, as everybody did. We already had one pass at in and then it was a year later. We did a new casting and there was a lot of different youngsters and girls coming in, but Mila was definitely one of those that was really strong. And again, we know so many. We are such a small society. So it was important to have someone that we knew who could act, but had the support team of parents, and Mila really had that. But she's just a talent.”
“I think there was a year passing by, from the first one to the second, but on the second one Mila was, for me, definitely the one that had the shine the most,” adds Anders. “And I think we all felt like that. Me, Kim and Rebecca we were so much in agreement on Mila being something special. You could tell from the casting tape that she could pull it off. But like Pipaluk, is saying it was really important that there was support from the family because it is highly sensitive, the subject matter, and the fact that we are coming there to do a film in a different language. So it was all about the backup from the family...but Mila was for me such a great talent right from the very first tapes,”
“I think a week before we got to audition, they gave us papers...and I practiced two or three times a day, read them over and over again, and really got to know Pipaluk,” says Mila. “And then we went to the audition. And then we got filmed with a little camera, and then we got to another audition again.
“I've been in a couple of music videos but I've never acted before. That was my first time...I enjoyed it a lot. It was a lot of fun. It was one of my favourite things to do.”
She’s 11-years-old, she explains – turning 12 in April – and she was ten when she played the role, but nobosy kept any secrets from her about the subject matter.
“I understood what the film was about, because it's a problem in Greenland. So I think it's going to help kids that go through this to really open up.”
“Anders came with the with the graphic novel,” says Rebecca, explaining how her own involvement with the project began. “I remember reading it and being so blown away by the contrast in the book between the poetry and the beauty of the drawings and the colours and the landscape, and then the brutality of the story...it didn't take us long to agree that we really wanted to produce this and help Anders make this book come alive.”
“I think from the beginning, like Rebecca just said, we felt this was a very important story,” Kim agrees. “Just because it's important, doesn't mean that it [would] end up good, but we felt like the grounds for making this was there.
“The partnership with people in Greenland was so so important, because we needed to know that we came into Greenland on good terms, and that we were telling this story all together. And then of course, coming to the themes, these are issues that are heartbreaking. But it's also normal, it’s something that needs these stories and needs to be told. I'm glad that Mila feels that her performance and the film itself can maybe help the people that are in the same position to talk about these matters.”
“It was a very different film for me to do,” says Anders, “because first of all, the film is not linear. It takes place in three different time levels. You go back and forth between the past and the present, and a past before the past. And so much of the film is the poetry of the voiceover, and Pipaluk is really the main character in the story. And she's the little sister to Ivalu. She's searching for Ivalu, her older sister, in the nature. And for me, I always looked at this film as more like a visual poetry.
“I learned that in the hard way in the editing room, because it was so difficult to put together, because you could really structure this movie in so many different ways. But for me, it had to have a certain two things: it had to feel poetic and it had to feel like a mystery. And the mystery, of course, is the driver and what keeps you engaged, because this film is not about incest from the very beginning. And even when we get to show the rape scene in the movie, it's very subtle. It's not what's important here. It's trying to understand this from a child’s perspective.
“Of course, you want to do artistic pieces, but you also want an audience to understand what the story is about, so that was also a balance. And we really tested this film during the editing process quite a lot. I don't think I've tested this much, and showing this film to so many people, just to make sure that people understand what's going on. But also accepting that some people might not see everything the first time. I think that that's fine for a film like this, that some things you experience on the second view.
“It's very much a movie that's also in sound. The sound design is so vital for the experience and I think also it's very much a movie that will feel more powerful on the big screen when everything is shut out and you can really get into the nature and the sound design. The music also of the movie so, but for Kim and Rebecca and Pipaluk and I, we wanted to keep it poetic like that and know that it's okay if there's a couple of people who might find it boring or a slow burn. That's fine.”
I ask if it was difficult to condense the story down into this 16 minute film, but Anders says it was the opposite.
“Really, the difficult part was to extend the graphic novel, because the graphic novel is even shorter than the film!” He laughs. “One thing we knew we wanted to change in the book is it’s beautiful, but it's also very dark.”
The ending, in particular, is handled in a very dark way, he notes.
“For me, it's important that in any story that I want to be a part of, there has to be some kind of hope and inspired human belief. But also, that's also a balance dealing with this subject matter, because you don't want to come off as naive, you know, dealing with so much pain for so many people. So trying to understand what could be that hope, in the movie that wasn't in the book, that could at least shine a little bit of light on that there might be a way out of this.
“In this case, we ended up keeping it open very much, to talk into a community kind of feeling by putting in an extra character. There's no grandma in the book, but we have a grandma in our film. She represents, of course, that if there's other people, you know, hearing or learning about this, then it's important that people do something about it. Don't turn off. “
I ask about the experience of shooting in a place with so much snow and dry air, something which cinematographers often find limiting.
“I think shooting in Greenland was the greatest gift of all,” says Anders. ”I'm not sure if there was any technical problems, you will have to ask my DP, but for me, it was one of the most beautiful experiences. I felt like we could point the camera in any direction and things just looked interesting or mysterious or beautiful... Because of the nature we were told and prepared that we might end up waiting for days in order for us to shoot, because the weather changes so fast in Greenland. I remember we had long conversations about how many days we had to plan for that, extra days in order for the weather not to go our way.”
“We use nature a lot in our films too,” says Pipaluk, “and it's something that people really like, and we have great locations. But again, it is an inner story that speaks very well about her loneliness as well in this big nature, her running around. But just to add, in the graphic novel – it is from the Danish company too, but it speaks about colonialism too. It jumps from Christianity when the Vikings came to Greenland, to when we get the G-50 [economic designation], which was in the industry of Greenland. Anders translated that into a more personal story. And like, it is a personal story when you see the graphic novel, but as I see it as a Greenlander, in the graphic novel, it is such a statement.
“This is really about the child perspective, as Anders said, it's a more inner story, it’s a more personal story. But I think it's a good way to go in and, and his touch was, I think, better. It could have been more complex but it wasn't, and I think that was really nice.”
“The other thing is, of course, we have many myths in Greenland and Anders chose the Sedna myth, which is about balance in your life. If you're too greedy then the mother of the sea will like take something from your people because of your greediness or if you don't have balance. But another thing, we have a mythology of incest as well. I would say is about the Moon and the Sun, which is about like it's always wrong, and the Moon should never take the Sun, which is the sister and the Moon is the brother. So it is something in mythology that we have a lot and the story that we tell our children about Sedna. So myth is a huge part of the storytelling thing as well.
“In Greenland we got self- government in 2011, and from that we are really claiming and hoping on being independent. We are not independent, we're still under the Kingdom of Denmark. So all of this with identities is a huge question for us. And there's something in identity, in film, we want to talk about and explore. And I think with this film we can talk about in a collaboration between a Danish company and a Greenlandic company, is that okay, if we want to try to tell stories together, we could do this, or maybe the next step will be that actually more Greenlandic stories could come out from inside out. And that is something that I've been working for the last 10 years in Greenland.
“I know with Mila the thing that we had is there is a lot of social problems and we often want to tell the stories because again, all over the world, it is about taboo. And if you talk more about things, it can save life. So this film is important to you, especially when you have it in Greenlandic because you reflect what you see. And you see, okay, this is my language. So maybe if a child or a youngster is abused, it can actually use these materials to save lives, right? And that's why we want to be a part of this.”
“I guess now, when I look back on the last 10 years, nine films, short films and features, they all have children in the main,” observes Anders. “They all deal with various subject matters about the kids finding themselves in unbearable or difficult situations...I'm not quite sure why I keep returning to that specific subject matter...I just have this urge to tell stories about children and, you know, it gets my blood boiling if children are being treated in an inhumane way.”
I note that the film is very successful in capturing a child's perspective – physically, in terms of camera angles, and psychologically. How did he approach that?
“I think it was always about the contrast, you know? The vast nature of Greenland, that epic landscape. If you put in a small 10-year-old girl running around in that vast nature, then right away, you are telling something with pictures, you're telling something about feeling alone, you're telling something about being alone in the world, and maybe being misunderstood. And so it has that psychological aspect, of course. That's why I thought it was important to do this and nature plays such a big part, because it was really a way of communicating with the inner feelings of the child.
“Slowly you find yourself also running from more civilised nature, and then it changes as she searches for her for her older sister, it becomes colder and colder. And that also, of course, reflects on how she feels, because she starts to understand as that search takes place, that something is wrong here. And we as an audience start to feel that maybe it's not totally – but I'm totally convinced that the audience in a subtle, subtle way will feel that, by understanding that the physical surroundings are getting colder and more lonely. So it was very much an aspect of communicating the inner life of the child.”
“We do this because we love the film and it needs to be told,” says Kim. “But of course, I've always said that with all the films that have gone to the Oscars, it’s basically yes, everybody loves the Oscars, but for the film it’s basically the biggest distribution platform in the world for short film, and with these subject matters that some of these great Oscar shorts has, it’s just a thing that if you get into this, then you're really there to take your film and get it out in the world, so the issues that are dealt with in those films really get talked about, get discussed.
“That's all we really want to do with this. That's really to get all the things that we've heard everybody in this talk about, to get that that vision out there, to open up a conversation in not only Greenland, but around the world where they have taboos about incest and family violence, it could be other kinds of taboos, just a thing about opening up and getting people to understand that we need to talk about things and not hide them.”
