The Ones Who Greive is about to premiere in Austin, Texas at this years edition of Fantastic Fest.
Writer & Director Quarxx had a conversation with Robert Aaron Mitchell about the filmmaking process to realize his latest film. Here is that conversation:
Did you encounter George Orwell’s writing before deciding to make a movie about his life and work? Did you read him directly, or had you already absorbed some of his ideas through popular culture, or thinkers working under his influence?
Of course, if you have gone to school, if you have gone to university, then you have to cross paths with George Orwell. That’s obligatory. I grew up in many different countries and in each of them, Orwell is (was) a known commodity. But, politically, there were more important thinkers in my life, especially coming from the Third World. My political focus was rather about the North/South axis and tensions than the West sulking on its own problems. I probably had some suspicion towards Orwell over time. When you talk to people on the left specifically, some had a troubled relationship with his political evolution. He was suspicious. Before I started this project, I talked to two writer friends—both very famous, I won’t name them—and asked them if I should make a movie about George Orwell. One of them is British, a Marxist, still very left wing. The other one is American. One said that I shouldn’t do it, the latter, amused, was looking forward to my take. These are both people with whom I share certain experiences and positions, so it rather energized me. And now, more than ever, I feel very much closer to Orwell’s way of thinking—his autonomy of thinking, outside of any sort of dogma.
Resisting dogma is a major theme of his work, which is why it’s interesting that some critics are dogmatic about him: his politics, his ideology, his affiliations...
Well, everybody has claimed Orwell. And there are many instances that he would have disagreed with. Like the CIA, which put a lot of money into the first film production of Animal Farm. For them, that book and “1984” were perfect propaganda that could be used against the Soviet Union. Even though Orwell did use extensively Stalinism as the central vehicle and inspiration for these books, but he was not strictly referring to what was happening in the communism countries in the east. They were only very potent examples. Orwell’s analysis and criticism was not exclusively towards the East. He was also talking about democracies everywhere on the planet. He was talking as well about England and other European countries. As he wrote: “But to be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.” People tried to fit his work towards their narratives during the Cold War, but they did it using one small part of who he was.
Your film deals with Orwell’s writing and his biography and how the two are linked; the impact of growing up in India and observing imperialism first-hand is significant. The photo of the infant Orwell being held by his Indian nanny is striking and very resonant—you use it to bookend the film, and to draw out a number of different ideas and meanings...
That photo became something of a reckoning for me. I thought: ‘Oh! Orwell is a brother. This is somebody from the Third World!’ If you grow up as a child in the Third World, it changes you and your view of the world. You can ask any “westerner” who grew up in Africa or in India and their view of the world have turned either totally racist or genuinely universal. That was a starting point for me. I was working on my film about Ernest Cole, and there was a sequence where you see these nannies in South Africa—Black nannies taking care of white, blonde children. You understand the absurdity of racism when you see how those white parents would hand the most valuable being in their lives—their child—into the hands of people they totally despise, people who they consider as basically animals. How totally fucked up is that? One of the nannies says in the film: “I love this child, but I know when she grows up she will be just like her mother”. This picture of Orwell with his black nanny connected me with him: he just turns out to be a fine human being. The interpretation of this picture at the beginning of the film differs from the one at the end of the film. It’s the same photo but it means two different things. At first, we see it and think. That fragile child with his black nanny. A uniquely warm, innocent and exotic childhood. And then the second time, at the end of the film, it’s scarier. You think ‘Oh my God... That woman would have every motive to just strangle that child’. There is a sense of unease and panic. It’s as if the whole history of the world hangs on the nanny’s ability to be a correct person, not to violate that trust and that original bond.
The image of Orwell’s birth rhymes with what we know about his death; the disease that rendered him weak and helpless. That feeling manifests in 1984, in the scenes of Winston’s torture and degradation, the way he is infantilized by his tormentors...
I knew from the start that I had to find a human and emotional point of entry to Orwell’s life and work. I had to find his “boiling point”. That point is more often than not the birth of something original, bold, determining to start threading a narrative. I don’t make biographies; I choose a moment in the life of a character that allows me to tell the bigger story. For Orwell, I found that moment quite rapidly. It is the last year of his life. At that time, he pretty much can guess that he doesn’t have much time to live. He's struggling to finish that novel that will make him famous and that he will not even live to see. He died four months after releasing 1984. He will never know the impact of that novel. The dramatic undercurrent of the film tension and dialectic lies on this state of his life between life and death and the struggle of finishing his “last” novel.
Do you feel that you came to understand Orwell as a person as well as thinker while making this film?
I think I did not only understand him as a writer, a thinker, but also as a human being. Without that, I don’t think the film would have made sense to me. Even in terms of how I see the world today, this understanding was key.
At the end of 1984, Winston mentions the proles, which is not just the proletariat—it’s something bigger. It’s the whole planet, including the “Third World”. And I am trying to reclaim Orwell for that third world, for my side of the world. Just as I cannot make a movie about a writer or a thinker whom I do not fundamentally understand and whose work I respect. I did films about James Baldwin, Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba—people I understood profoundly. I knew their fight, their conflicts, their demons even that fueled their bold and unique undertaking. With Orwell, it was the first time I was going into a film without a deep personal connection to the subject, but I was able to find my bearings very early on. As soon as I re-read this incredible and lesser-known essay entitled “Why I Write,” I knew I was there.
You quote more extensively from “Why I Write” in your film than any other piece—more than 1984, even.
That text is him. It’s all of him, it’s a confession. It’s an act of contrition. He’s not hiding anything, “...I was part of the actual machinery of despotism”, having “bullied” the natives and even hanged a few, his despise of his own social class and the classes above, the hardship of imposed poverty in London and Paris, to experience “reality”, etc. You see the man, with all of his flaws. It’s not a lecture; it’s about putting a mirror up to his own face. That idea of the mirror—that’s something else I want people to understand. I have a lot of trouble every time I hear columnists talk about “dystopia” or calling him a “prophet.” He was of course not a prophet. He was talking about the world around him. It’s not a projection, it’s an analysis. He’s working through it all: what he went through in British Imperium; what he went through in the Spanish Civil War, what he experienced in England, in Paris etc. He’s analyzing the early days of the Cold War. It’s not prophecy. It’s the world as it is, as he was living it.
What do you think differentiates Orwell’s analysis from later generations of writers?
The way I see it is this: in the 1970s, most serious writers needed to have a tremendous amount of general knowledge—about poetry, about history, about culture, geography etc... It was not as much about their inner lives or “feelings”. Inner life was the fuel, the Zeitgeist they used it to power the rest.
The recent decades, through what we could call a “democratization” of culture, and concurrently the focalization toward “the inner self”, almost anybody is entitled to write. Any experience is allowed to be printed and commercialized. You don't need the more general deeper knowledge of the universe above you nor the idea of the “collective “. You no longer must refer to the world around you. You ARE the world (or it revolves around you, personally, intimately).
We have lost the collective mind. We have lost the collective fight. I can see it in the generation after me. Nobody thinks about death the same way today, about risking one’s life for a cause. When I was studying in Berlin, I knew that I was going to go back to Haiti and die. My friends from South Africa, they knew they were going to go back to South Africa and die. My Iranian friends knew it, my Nicaraguan friends, my Brazilian friends, my Chilean friends. We all knew.
We didn’t talk about personal faith so much or about personal struggles or feelings (Not that it was a good thing. On the contrary. But it was just not proper). When the Berlin Wall fell, there was no stopping of the exuberant capitalism cries of victory. Capital had won. And so everything else that came with it. It was a complicated world, and we needed writers with a wealth of universal knowledge who could help us understand the moment beyond the allegorical Fukuyama’s “End of History”. But on the contrary, we went for full blown fragmentation, specialization, and individualism, inner soul and self-wellness among other developments. And this is in every field of all society, media, academia, politics. We lost the collective, the overall analysis. Everybody focused just on what they could chew and got lost in petty details.
In some ways, the right wing—at least in the West—has done a better job capturing the collective imagination, in politics and in popular culture as well.
It is always easier for those forces because they don’t have to care about the multitudes, nor about the truth or the nuances. They just have to care about their profits.
Capital not only has no frontier, but also tends to control politics, through different tools and procedures. To a point where any powerful president, at least in western democracies, merely has a negotiation power. We can see how President Obama, besides having inherited one of the major capitalistic crises in history, still was under the sway of the Wall Street power brokers. Every move or economic decision was the result of heavy discussion and compromise, in which more than once, banks and industry well-being were privileged over citizen interests.
Authoritarian regimes operate with less moral qualms and restraints.
The ending of A Face in the Crowd comes to mind — except that instead of being exposed by the television cameras, authoritarian leaders are emboldened by them.
There is no limit. If you just let it go on there is no ending.
In Germany in the 1930s, Hitler took at least six, seven years to become Hitler. The establishment thought that they would “control” him at the end. He had written out what he was going to do in Mein Kampf. And nobody took that seriously. It’s the same with Project 2025. At what point do you start to take warnings seriously? Bullies, authoritarians—they have no limit. It will get worse and worse until they are stopped. It's not right against left now. It’s an authoritarian regime. It’s Big Brother. It’s the same with authoritarian playbooks today, in many countries. The names change; the goals don’t. They target institutions, courts, media, civil society. They follow the same script as abusers: isolate, humiliate, intimidate. They’re predators. And unless stopped, they escalate.
I grew up in many different dictatorships. Whether it was Haiti, or whether it was the Congo... we could feel early on when something was going wrong. It’s when people cannot speak their minds anymore, when you must think twice before saying things in public, or addressing certain topics. That’s what dictatorship is. It’s little by little.
Did you know at the beginning how much contemporary politics in general—would be threaded through your portrait of Orwell?
That all came very quickly when I went through “Why I Write.” I wrote a one-page summary for our investors, and the film was all there right from the gate. Except that I didn’t realize at first that it would go so deep and dark and morph so close to our reality. When the project was proposed to Alex Gibney and then myself —we knew that we couldn’t say no: we were being offered access to everything Orwell had written. The same access I had gotten with James Baldwin’s body of work, who, as I said, was closer to home for me. When you have that kind of access and you don’t make a great film, you’re in the wrong line of work. With Orwell, it was also a once in a lifetime opportunity. What I knew I needed to find was the connection to the world I’m living in, and that’s what I mean when I say Orwell is a “brother”. He saw the world in a way I can relate to. I had my share of Big Brothers throughout my life. In my youth, the U.S. was supporting dictatorships in Haiti, killing Lumumba in the Congo and staging numerous coups in foreign countries. And Newspeak was always part of my reality. When they say “democracy”, it was never meant for the likes of me. I grew up with Newspeak. I grew up with Big Brother. In the Third World, we all grew up in the shadow of Big Brother.
The language of euphemism is another major subject in the movie; it’s the language of corporations, a sort of airbrushing of agendas, the rhetoric of hard-sell advertising.
It's corporate, it’s political, it’s military. All of it. As a Black person, my life is about deconstruction. Why do we deconstruct? Because we know that what we are seeing is not our reality. We grew up deconstructing Hollywood films because we knew that when we were seeing Indians being killed by cowboys, that they were us. To enjoy the film, we had to deconstruct it, to make it accessible (or acceptable) to us. The ironies and contradictions were obvious. Hollywood was never a “dream” for us. We grew up with that dichotomy. The movies were Newspeak.
Because American movies are so big and expensive they can be hard to deconstruct. They’re made to be solid, to be impenetrable. They’re weapons of soft power.
That power was never totally “soft” for us. The traces linger for very long. Soft power is never innocent. If you live in the West, there’s no need to deconstruct that power. That's the privilege that you have: you don't have to. Elsewhere, if you don’t deconstruct that power, it will kill you. For a more profound and definitive analysis of this, and way more eloquent than me, I would recommend The Devil Finds Work from James Baldwin. That’s what James Baldwin said about Hollywood in The Devil Finds Work.
Baldwin’s profile has been raised in the years since your documentary. There were two different movies this year—Eddington and Sorry, Baby—that used him as a reference or a signifier, and of course there was Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk.
Yes, Baldwin is back, baby! As he should be. And I am glad that a whole new generation is reappropriating his work anew.
When Barry Jenkins made Beale Street he invented a new genre, a new way for black actors to work and play their parts. I have worked with black actors for forty-five years, and I can see how Beale Street was a successful attempt to propose something new, that is not a cliché. American movies reproduce cliches over cliches over cliches, sometimes ironically, sometimes not. [Jenkins] succeeded in finding a new way for actors to show emotions, to show pain, to show joy, to show love.
Is it fair to say that more movie critics have read Orwell than Baldwin?
By the sheer mathematical reality, it is evidently true. But I'm not sure that many more now have read Baldwin, if it is only to keep up with the flow.
That being said, I am sure most know about Orwell as “the prophet” rather than somebody who is actually writing about the real world. The thing about Orwell is : everything he wrote, he went through himself. The editing of the movie tries to reflect that. We can see how the physical reality of his illness—his tuberculosis—finds its echo in the rendering of Winston in 1984, where the motif of the ‘lungs’ recurs throughout. We can also observe how Orwell’s own complicated behavior with women is mirrored in the strange, often uneasy and sometimes disturbing dynamics of Winston’s short-lived and tragic relationship with Julia (‘Do it to Julia, not me!’).”
He could be an awkward man in real life. He was awkward with women. With his last wife, Sonia Brownell, he asked to marry just a few months later after meeting her although his health was already severely impaired. I can hardly believe that he was even in love. His work was his life story. He could only write about things he went through. If you read 1984 as a prophecy, you will really miss out on Orwell's essence.
There’s something adolescent about Orwell: a sense of idealism that never faded as he grew older. It’s also palpable because he had such a short life.
The adolescence you’re talking about is only possible in the West. Because you can afford to be a fully grown adolescent in the West. Orwell, protected himself from that delusion through humor, sometimes even through cynicism and wit. His distinctly British sense of distance probably saved him from despair. Because he “knew” and could not “unknow” what he had seen.
How did you go about organizing the material in the film?
My job is to find a way to make a movie that’s accessible for everybody, not just for literary savvy people. We read everything—everything that Orwell wrote and then I started to make selections from the text. I knew that I had to come up with a sort of libretto, the same way I did for James Baldwin. Making a film is obviously not like writing a book. It’s closer to the way you might write an opera, except that you’re using somebody else’s words. Orwell’s words are strong. I have to be careful though to not twist his words. My work on Baldwin did help me a lot. His humanity was closer to me and easier to handle. Orwell is more... British. You have to find the emotion in it. We took a lot from “Why I Write” because it’s more sincere, human and direct— both about himself and about the society he is writing about. It's perfect material for a voice-over.
The movie includes footage of the war in Ukraine and Gaza; these are very charged images to put in a movie about a writer who died seventy-five years ago.
I’ve been making films for 40 years. All of the movies I’ve made are about alarming people to the state of the world. I’ve never made a film that I didn’t totally believe in. And making 2+2=5 was basically like watching the news. For example, I was re-reading 1984. At the very beginning, Winston is writing his journal: “April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films...”. Then he basically described how the coast guards are bombarding a boat full of refugees in the middle of the Mediterranean. Sounds familiar? This gives you the chills. You basically just saw that in the Evening News! Orwell is exactly what’s happening now. Even the audience’s reaction, us, sounds so familiar: We don’t care. Every day boats are sinking. Nobody stops it.
The Zone of Interest comes to mind—that vision of compartmentalization, of living adjacent to suffering.
I lived like that in Germany for fifteen years, in that state of mind. I talked about it in Exterminate All the Brutes. I’m Black, not Jewish, but the Holocaust was also my reality. I did my film school essay at Plötzensee, a Nazi torture chamber in the middle of Berlin. There is that phrase “never again.” People see it as a philosophical sentence, barely a warning nowadays. How many people repeated “never again” again, and again, and again. The same countries that were the “liberators” do this everywhere else. It takes different forms, but you know, it’s the same.
I’ve done several films about genocide, so this is not new to me. Orwell is just the latest one. People need to look at their reality. Consumerism has overcome the West while the rest of the world is looking. They know it’s all an illusion. That you are in a sort of a bubble.
There are refugees on every corner in Paris today, or in other European capitals, where people are just being pushed from one corner to another. Just wait for the next Alcatraz city. Yet, they are the ones doing most of the “second front” to use a covid popular term. Delivering food every day, working at meat factories, taking care of the elders, etc... they were dying by the hundreds during COVID. That’s the part of the world that’s watching the “opulent” West (of course we know that it’s not opulent for everybody). I doubt that they still believe in all those well-meaning words, like democracy, justice, human rights, etc.
In the film, you quote the end of 1984, the idea of a faint hope in the darkness. Do you think that hope is real? Or is it just another platitude?
There cannot be hope without understanding. Marx wrote the same thing: you can’t push people to the barricades if they don’t know what they’re fighting for, if they don’t understand the whole system and why it is making them miserable. You can go to the barricade and burn down everything out of anger, and then what do you do after that? You still have to rebuild something. It can’t just be Christian hope—the hope that “it’s going to get better.”
Maybe it’s not hope we need; maybe we need reality. We need to cease just being consumers. We even consume democracy! We choose for whom to vote like we choose a soap bar. “Let’s try this one this time.” It’s consumerism.
What I know for sure, history doesn't function with “hope”. If you want change, you need to act upon it. If we just stare, it will just be somebody else’s plan.
There are people who really do believe that 2+2=5, of course. And others who may not believe it, but find it easier to say it.
Some people may believe that, but I don’t need to indulge in their craziness. In the beginning of the film, there is a clip of Orwell with his son Richard as he advises him: “always know that two and two are four.” Some people will tell you that two and two are five. They are called governments... big corporations. ...They will torture you... they will bribe you... etc...”
In hard times, we need to have the courage to say that: “Two and two equals four”
That’s what the film is about.
Where does this story of a failed old poet come from? What did you want to explore?
It’s the most personal project I’ve ever made. It began with an intimate question: what if I failed at art? Making films in Colombia is incredibly difficult, and after my first feature, I seriously considered giving up. I pictured myself at fifty, making a living as a teacher — which, in fact, is still how I pay the bills — and surviving on idealized memories of a past life in art. I also wanted to explore art from the inside: what it means to create, the limitations it imposes, the compromises it demands. The film grew out of a kind of exhaustion with the machinery of art, and from a longing to make something free, unshaped, with a spirit that felt almost punk. It was a way of reconnecting with what cinema once meant to me. Rather than portray myself as a filmmaker, I chose the figure of a poet, because being a poet is, if anything, even more utopian.
The film asks what art is and what it’s for. And it explores these questions through poetry, the least industrial form of art there is.
Art is often seen as something noble, but it’s also an industry, even when it’s independent. In cinema, for instance, there’s a market that dictates what audiences expect to see: certain patterns repeat, especially in Latin American cinema. As an artist, you must decide whether to cater to this external demand or question what truly drives you. I wanted to return to something more pure: a raw, visceral form of art that’s less mechanical. That’s when poetry emerged. It wasn’t a strategic choice, but an intuitive one. In my city, Medellín, I have met many poets who don’t fit the idealized mold. They’re streetwise, punk, very real, and I found them more fascinating than the filmmaker figure. Poetry has an anachronistic quality — it feels as though it still exists in the past, and that aspect resonated with me for this story. For instance, poetry readings seem almost timeless, removed from the idea of art as something utilitarian or marketable. Within that realm, there are contradictions and a very specific kind of humor that I wanted to explore through dark comedy.
The bond between Óscar and Yurlady is central to the film. What did you hope to explore through their teacher-student relationship? Is there a form of mutual salvation in it?
Yes, absolutely. Through that relationship, I wanted to explore several dilemmas I encounter in making art, especially in a place like Colombia, where social inequalities are so pronounced. Art, and cinema in particular, often operates within a logic where the creator, from a more privileged position, transforms the “other,” the less privileged character, into raw material for their work. This raises an uncomfortable question: how do you represent that “other” without stripping them of their true essence? The relationship between Óscar and Yurlady helped me address that, because she’s neither an idealized figure nor a great literary prodigy; she simply writes because she enjoys it, because she needs to. On the other hand, he’s worn out, disillusioned. In their encounter, I believe they illuminate each other: she embodies a purer, freer form of art, less contaminated by the market or the need for validation. And that forces him to confront what he’s lost. So yes, there’s a kind of mutual salvation, but not in a romantic sense, more as a chance to reconnect with what’s truly essential.
A Poet moves between comedy and drama, parody and tragedy, in a very delicate balance. How did you manage to mix those tones?
I didn’t have a clear formula, to be honest. I relied a lot on intuition. Even while writing, I was already envisioning small gags and subtle comedic moments, trusting they would work once filmed. But that’s something you never really know until the film meets the audience, so I’m still waiting to see. With this second film, I primarily wanted to enjoy the process. With the first one, I was extremely stressed, full of anxiety. This time, I aimed to make the experience enjoyable, even liberating — like a personal exorcism. Comedy helped with that: it allowed me to play, to laugh at myself, at what it means to be an artist. And at the same time, to use comedy as a means of addressing serious topics. Hopefully, that mix works, because for me, it was essential not to create a rigid film, but one that could move freely across different registers.
Your film might evoke New York Jewish comedy — with the clarinet leitmotif in the soundtrack — or a certain kind of Argentine humor. Do you recognize those influences?
Yes, absolutely. In fact, it was really difficult to finance the film because of that. A Colombian comedy about poets didn’t fit the stereotypes the market expects from a film made in my country. People told us it felt like an Argentine comedy or a Woody Allen film, and of course, when that kind of movie comes from Argentina, it makes sense and sells. But when it comes from Colombia, no one knows what to do with it. There are clear nods to the comedies you mentioned: the clarinet is an obvious parody, an absurd homage to that world of New York poets, so intellectual and sophisticated, but it’s placed in a completely different context, embodied by a guy from Medellín, nostalgic, a little pathetic, pretending to be Bukowski. That dissonance felt both funny and powerful to me, playing with the contrast between what the character thinks he is and what he truly is. That tension is very much present in the film’s overall tone.
How did you find Ubeimar Ríos and what made you trust him with the lead role?
He’s the uncle of a friend, and one day my friend told me, “Look, this is your poet,” and sent me his profile. Ubeimar is a schoolteacher who lives in a town outside Medellín, writes columns for local newspapers, has an interest in poetry and music, and organizes cultural events. He has a unique way of speaking and moving that I found fascinating. Initially, I didn’t cast him because I was set on working with professional actors. In previous projects, I had worked with non-professionals, and this time I wanted to try something different. But Ubeimar stuck with me, and I called him back. He was recovering from surgery, so we went to the finca where he lives to do a casting, and it was obvious: there was an immediate, intuitive connection with the character. What happened next was beautiful: Óscar, in the script, was a less likable character, but Ubeimar brought a humanity to him that wasn’t written. During the shoot, everyone grew fond of him. That changed everything. His presence softened the character, and despite his flaws, he became more endearing.
And Rebeca Andrade, who plays Yurlady? Why did you choose her?
The process with Rebeca was lengthy, especially in understanding the character. We held auditions at schools and high schools across Medellín for a long time. We saw many girls, but we finally found her in a public school. From there, we began an intensive preparation process with both actors, along with a coach and a team that worked with them for two months. It was a very constructive process — we went over each scene, one by one. Ubeimar had to temporarily leave his teaching job to fully commit to this acting training. It was a huge transformation. That’s when I realized that, in the end, it’s not about finding actors or non-actors, it’s about finding the right person for the character.
Where did you shoot the film? Is there also a social portrait, a view of class and its tensions in the film?
Yes, absolutely. We shot in Medellín, which is where I live and where I’ve made all my films. And from the start I wanted to highlight the difference in social classes. Óscar comes from a middle-class background, while Yurlady comes from a lower one. That tension is very common in Medellín, a city with very marked social contrasts. I wanted to address that conflict through comedy. There’s a reflection on art and its social dilemmas, on how art confronts, or doesn’t confront, those tensions. In Latin America, art tends to be very political, very social, and I wanted to play with that: with the expectation that a Colombian film must address certain themes, in a certain way.
Why was it important to shoot on 16mm?
I was looking for an aesthetic that evoked the past, because these poets are somewhat from another era. On the other hand, the film talks about certain dilemmas of middle- aged men, that time between youth and adulthood when you already start to feel outdated. I’m 39 and I’m in that place too, between two generations. I sometimes find myself rejecting the new, and other times the old. It made sense for everything to have a slightly outdated texture. Shooting on 16mm helped give the film’s world a kind of ’80s look, gritty, rough, a bit like John Cassavetes. We didn’t want a clean, shiny, digital image. We wanted something uglier, more imperfect, adding another aesthetic and emotional layer to the film. And, of course, it was a personal pleasure: shooting on 16mm is a very special experience for any filmmaker.
It’s also a story of reconciliation between a father and a daughter. Were you interested in showing that through a surrogate figure, this “false daughter” embodied by Yurlady?
The father is usually a distant figure, and the artist even more so. There’s this very strong cliché: the Bukowski-type artist is always a bad father, disastrous, egocentric. You know, all those clichés of manhood and artistry. And while I didn’t want to completely deny them, I was interested in showing something else: fragility. For me, this was the least interesting character to build a story around, because he’s not someone who draws attention. But maybe that’s what attracted me most: trying to find some beauty in that man, however small. It was also a kind of exorcism: I wanted to portray my own flaws, doubts, and contradictions.
The film was completed in early 2025 and is already selected at Cannes. Why such a fast production process?
Yes, it was very rushed. We started shooting on January 14 and wrapped around February 16, planning to take a lot of time for editing... but that didn’t happen. We also wanted to break away from today’s highly structured filmmaking logic: labs, workshops, residencies. Everything is so regulated. And sometimes the most important thing is just to make the film, even if it’s not perfect. After shooting, I locked myself in for a month to edit with Ricardo, the editor. We managed to finish a first cut, although we knew it wasn’t completely ready. Then we had to decide: keep editing or send it to Cannes? In the end we submitted it — past the deadline, I have to say — and it was crazy because they had already announced part of the official selection. But they watched it, were interested, and invited us. If they hadn’t selected it, we would’ve kept working on it. And even now, I’m not sure it was the best decision, because we’re still racing against the clock, finishing postproduction. But I think that unfinished quality suits the film’s aesthetic. In most cases, you can only make a movie every three or four years. I’d like to shoot more often, even if with less. That’s why I felt okay letting this one go, even if it wasn’t perfect — that’s probably what defines it.
The Love That Remains can be seen as a departure from many of your previous films, particularly from the epic scope of Godland – what made you want to jump into such a thematically and aesthetically different film?
I don’t like to have too many preconceived intentions because I want my films to be honest, spontaneous, and as close as possible to the actual human experience. The topics are always broad and numerous. This film is about nature, about what we build, re-build or destroy, about what unites and divides us, miscommunication and conflicting feelings. But it is above all about family, that is the core of the film and its beating heart – which is a natural extension of my previous films, both short and long.
We tend to think that what matters in the world is the big picture, like politics, but to me, in a way, the most important things as human beings are the small and intimate ones, the ones close to us: your relationship with your family, your siblings, your children, nature, the place you inhabit. After Godland, my desire was to tell a story set in the present day, exploring the times we live in. I wanted to shoot what is close to me, around me, in the garden, without having to build or recreate anything. To show things, not in an artificial way, but as they truly are. Working with the intimate, the mundane or even the ugly – not something epic, perfect or outstanding – was both a want and a need. It’s a film about the intimate, the familiar and the strange – there is a dreamy aspect, but I also wanted everything to be fluid, to constantly move like water.
Audiences are bound to wonder to what degree the film is autobiographical. Even if it is not, what made you want to write and direct a more personal film, closer in many ways to your own life?
All of my films are personal, because the crew and the cast are often people who are close to me, and even the locations, the houses, the cars... they’re all things that I find around me. It was already the case for my previous features, but this one might indeed be the most personal – along with my short film Nest – because my three children are in it.
The idea for The Love that Remains came to me during the process of shooting Nest – in which I filmed the kids playing in a tree house over a period of a year and a half. While filming, I started wondering what the parents were doing in the meantime, since they were always off-screen: they are referred to, but never seen. That’s when I started imagining different narrative threads, intertwined, that would enhance one another.
I originally intended to make Nest a part of the feature but time flew by, I shot Godland, and the short movie became its own thing. So I started developing another story connected to the core of The Love that Remains: the kids constructing the figure of a knight, as time passes and the seasons change. I wanted these scenes to resonate with the central thread of The Love that Remains, which offered endless, exciting possibilities.
We started shooting those scenes (part of a short film entitled Joan of Arc) two years ago, while we were developing the feature. Other images of the feature were also shot before principal photography, because I always have a camera with me and need to film what’s going on around me, in real life. This is the case, for instance, for the images of the roof being taken apart. My process is always very open, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going to happen.
The depiction of the relationship, its complexities and grey areas feels extremely authentic. Even in separation there is love. How did you strike this balance?
From the beginning of development, it was clear to me that I didn’t want the film to be unequivocal, to settle on just one side. Because in real life, you want something and at the same time you don’t want it, you constantly have one feeling and its opposite. Everybody is fragile and complex and that’s what makes a character interesting. The film had to remain open to interpretation, both emotionally and story-wise. Nobody is just the good guy or the bad guy. When it comes to the parents going through a separation, the important thing is not why they’re splitting, or whether they’ll get back together, I’m not giving or looking for any answers or explanations.
The film is about how we spend our time: what’s important, really? The time you spend with your family, with those you love, the memories you create. It’s about life itself, about memory and the sense
of belonging. What happens to a family when they split, what happens to all the memories and moments they shared? What happens to the love that remains?
Love can only be known by its absence. We become immune to its presence, it’s sometimes difficult to see the love around you or the beauty in life. That’s what I wanted to try and tackle, that’s what I want the audience to feel. Maybe if people just tended to their garden, respected their neighbors, their children and nature, the world would be a better place. But everything and everyone has a darker side, and I don’t want my films to convey a glamorized image of life.
Life is both light and dark, funny and brutal, full of contrasts. Even children, as we see in the film, are both capable of creating and destroying. Violence is a deep part of humanity, we’re an incredibly brutal species. This is also interesting. Life and people can both take a turn for the worse very quickly. Like a lot of people, I often have the feeling that the world is falling apart, and it’s impossible to make a film that is not coloured by that.
A through line in the film is the artist’s struggle for recognition, understanding; in parallel with the daily struggles of life. Why was the artist’s journey, and the art itself, important to bring into the film?
One of the characters, who’s an artist and a mother of three who just split up with their father, is struggling in many ways. Not only for recognition, but above all because she’s looking for meaning, trying to be a part of the world in a way that stimulates her. She is working a lot while taking care of her children and making their world go round too. She’s probably handling everything, all of the small things, while attempting to figure out what she wants, what her own thing can be. And when she fails, she keeps going and tries again.
Her artistic process is very physical. It’s actually my own process: every autumn I leave a series of art works outside over the cold months, and I collect them before it gets too warm and moist. It’s a nice process to look at: you draw, cut out the forms in the iron, lay them on the ground, then collect them, clean them, dry them... A lot of the things that happen in the movie in this regard, such as when she discovers the horses have ruined part of her work, or when a goose lays her eggs at the same spot, actually happened to me.
So the film is also about an artist trying to figure out how to work in this world, how to work on the things she loves and to live an interesting and meaningful life, to create a routine she finds exciting. And of course it’s hard to do the things you want to do and still be able to pay the bills and take care of your family. I was exploring all of that with her character, and sometimes also having fun, because part of being an artist is managing to show your art too. That’s why I wrote the scenes with the gallery owner – which are crazy, but then again, the world is crazier than most films.
But hers is not the only search for meaning. It is juxtaposed with Magnús’ journey: a fisherman, her ex-fiancé and the father of the three children. Magnus is still having a difficult time navigating his feelings. We feel his underlying anger, but also his sadness, his struggle with the separation. His feeling of being excluded from the family’s daily life. The world he had built is falling apart. But he’s trying to hold on to it, while also trying to find his place in his new life.
Your real children have now appeared in most of your films, including this one. What was special about shooting with them for The Love That Remains?
This is the first feature in which the three of them all appear, and moreover they had a big responsibility. They’re a big part of the film, with long scenes. They’re the third thread of the film – the three siblings and their process of building a figure (a knight) and firing arrows at it. We spend time with and gradually learn to know them and their own perception of what it means to struggle in life. Their energy was crucial for me, I don’t think I would have been able to make this film without those three crazy kids and their raw, wild energy. It was a lot of fun, and it was easy to include them because they already knew pretty much everybody on set. Everything felt very homemade.
There’s something gentle in all aspects of this film. Did you also have to be gentler in your approach?
Each project has a fragile, strange temperament, a personality. It’s often an idiosyncratic thing you have to take care of, so that it doesn’t fall off and die. There is always a core, and you have to find a way to lift it and make it shine.
What was important here was to create a nice, safe atmosphere for the actors and the crew to work and play together. I wanted as small a crew as possible on set, just a couple of people running around. A stripped down, very free shooting. I wrote the script with that idea in mind, without scenes that would be complicated to film, no big set ups. Just the camera, a light tripod, almost no lights. In all aspects, it had to be simple and straightforward, in order to capture the specific energy of the film and to balance everything in the right way – the crazy and the funny, the beautiful and the ugly, the family and nature, the siblings and the parents...That’s what I thought about the most: to keep the core of the film alive, to keep the energy right, to keep having fun. Because it’s so easy to kill a film.
Why use the cycle of the seasons to give a rhythm to the film? And how does this connect to some of the film’s most universal themes – rural life, the passing of time, or raising children?
Time is the filmmaker’s main medium and I want to explore that in as many ways as possible. I enjoy writing and filming over a long period of time and using it as a foundation, like a narrative thread throughout the movie. When you’re working on a film you’re always thinking about it and everything reminds you of it, you see and capture something you saw or heard outside and immediately start writing a scene mentally. This allows me to dream deeper, to lose myself in the project, which is what I love the most about the process. If you do that, it’s effortless, you don’t have to force anything, to force a narrative, what happens just emerges naturally. Being surprised is a huge part of my exploration as a filmmaker.
An additional ‘presence’ in the film, almost a character, a narrator, is the music of Harry Hunt. How did it become such a fundamental part of the film?
At first, I thought there would be no music in the film except for the diegetic music. But then I heard an album called Playing Piano for Dad by h hunt, and I started listening to it again and again while watching the dailies of the film without the sound. There was a lot of material and we needed to make decisions for the editing, and the atmosphere of the album seemed to fit extremely well with our images. So I contacted him, we got along really well and talked about how we could collaborate on the movie. We used this music way more than we thought we would, because it worked so well – also thanks to my editor Julius Krebs Damsbo, who is brilliant when it comes to using music. He knew I wanted h hunt’s music from the beginning of the editing process and we ended up using almost the whole album.
The Love That Remains feels like a story that you might have to “find” rather than to plan. Did the film change a lot as you were shooting, editing? How did you go about the shoot and what was the process of working with the actors?
The interesting thing is that many people think that the script was very different from the final form of the film, but it’s not. The only big difference is the addition of the scenes with the children and the knight. I think it’s because by the time we started principal photography, I had been developing it for a long time, I was ready to film it; we were already deep inside the project and able to stick to it – while keeping a form of freedom, of course. Regarding the actors, we didn’t have a lot of rehearsals but we did work together before filming, in order for them to be comfortable together. It was really important to me that you could really believe they were a family, joking around, spending good and hard times together.
