It is always a good sign when the organisers of a major event dissuade you from making for the airport.
Last September, Mika Gustafson’s Paradise Is Burning played to great applause at Venice International Film Festival. Written with Alexander Öhrstrand, a busy actor on Swedish TV, it follows three teenage sisters as they get by without their habitually missing mother. The film, which played in the Orizzonti (Horizon) section, throbs with anxiety, but it is also at home to much frantic joy. The oldest of the three juvenile actors was declared a star in waiting.
“Orizzonti is interesting,” Gustafson, a witty woman with an unstoppable manner, tells me. “What’s new on the horizon? That’s quite punk and new. But you are also in competition. We were, like, ‘It would be nice to win the prize!’”
The screening went well. Everyone cheered. She and Öhrstrand were packing up their stuff when the organisers phoned to ask if they might stay a night at the eye-wateringly baroque Excelsior Hotel and come to the closing ceremony.
“Mika said something like, ‘I’m going to win a diploma or something,’” Gustafson says. “It will be a ‘woman prize’ or something,” she says, laughing.
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“I knew it would be something big or they wouldn’t move us to the Excelsior,” Öhrstrand says. “I don’t know if you’ve been to the Excelsior.”
I have. It’s like walking into Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice.
“When we opened the door to the hotel room I said to Mika, ‘I expected a bigger room for such a fancy hotel.’ And she said, ‘This is just the hallway.’”
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of pointing out that Gustafson and Öhrstrand are the most down-to-earth of Swedish art-house auteurs. Gustafson was awarded best director in the Orizzonti section and the film was set on its journey to international distribution.
Born in 1988, the director studied at Valand film academy, at the University of Gothenburg, and in her year of graduation won the Nordic Talents prize. Paradise Is Burning, her first dramatic feature, reveals a truly original voice. One can find traces of the Swedish oddball Lukas Moodysson and the English realist Andrea Arnold in there, but the film has a sylvan otherness that is very much its own. We are not exactly in the countryside. But, filmed in a lush Scandinavian summer, the picture locates much of its action among drooping foliage and wild grassland.
“I wanted it to be very specific,” Gustafson says. “I want it to be an inner world. You and I have not grown up in the same country. But you should also recognise something in this inner world about how it is to grow up. I don’t know. We were looking for a location a lot. We are looking for almost a year. Our set designer rebuilt the whole home.”
“And the garden,” Öhrstrand adds. “You mention nature. Just because the kids are living alone we don’t want it to be bleak. We want it to be the opposite. It should be full of colour. Laura is 16 and sexuality is blooming. Nature is big and lush.”
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He mentions Laura. Paradise Is Burning has much to recommend it, but the performance by Bianca Delbravo – what a name for an actor – is next level. The eldest sister has a lot on her plate. We begin with her waking up to find a younger sibling has wet the bed. No sooner is that problem addressed than the authorities begin making life properly difficult. When social services announce they will be calling around to speak to her mother – currently elsewhere – Laura hides the information from the rest of the family. Her main form of diversion comprises breaking into the homes of wealthier neighbours and reading through their diaries.
It sounds like on-the-nose social realism. But Delbravo, anxious on the cusp of adulthood, brings enormous charisma and verve to the protagonist. Surely a mainstream career awaits.
“It took 10 months. It took a long time,” Gustafson says of the casting. “We talked to maybe 1,000 girls or something. To find these three sisters and get them together was complicated and fun. And, as a director, I’m always very involved in the casting process. I do some of the casting myself. And I involved Alex in the casting process. And he was, like, ‘I’ve never done casting before.’ But he’d been at casting. He knows what’s good and what’s bad.”
“To cut a long story short, I found our Laura outside a supermarket,” Öhrstrand says.
“Because I told you that you need to cast all the time,” his director kicks back. “You always have to be open. You can find her everywhere – like the supermarket or the train station.”
It is worth telling this story in full. The chatty Öhrstrand, who has appeared in such Swedish series as The Bridge and Wallander, is well up to the task.
“I was playing in one of the most popular TV series here in Sweden, and it was set in the 1970s,” he says. “So I had this handlebar moustache. I was going to get some breakfast and then to the grocery store. Then I heard this deep, raspy, girly voice screaming at somebody. I turned around and it was Bianca sitting in an oversized tracksuit, yelling at someone on the phone. I called Mika and said, ‘You need to come here, because this girl has a presence. There is something about her.’ She said, ‘I’m not going to make it in time. You have to ask for her number.’ And I said, ‘Are you crazy? I’m a 40-year-old man. I can’t do that. Talk about cancel me. They will kill me.’”
It is worth remembering that, if his own description is to be trusted, he was dressed up like the star of a 1970s adult movie.
“And I was, like, ‘You’re going to ruin the whole movie! Take her number,” Gustafson says.
“I was nervous,” he continues. “I took the wrong number, I missed digits and stuff. And then, a year later, we were doing a walk-and-talk of the script, and we walked past some kids and Mika’s head span around. ‘What’s that voice?’”
“She has a dark voice,” Gustafson notes.
So let me get this right. They accidentally bumped into her a second time? That’s like something that would happen in Ireland.
“Yes. That’s right. And it turned out that screaming at somebody on the phone was a total anomaly. She’s very much unlike that. When I met her she couldn’t ride a bike. She’d probably never been in a fight. She stays at home and writes poetry.”
The other two actors playing siblings were also non-professionals. We are used to seeing young first-timers excel in these sorts of naturalistic movies. But it remains a miracle on every occasion. However much effort the film-makers put into the casting they can never guarantee the magic will manifest on screen. Is there a trick to making it work? Must the director also become a teacher or a mentor?
“Yeah, it’s totally a trick. I think it’s why I started making film in the beginning at all,” Gustafson says. “I’m a huge fan of actors and I am truly curious. When something comes alive it is almost like magic. It really is like a trick. You plan a lot around it, but you don’t know whether it’s going to happen or not. It’s like you try to set up your friend with another friend. Maybe they fall in love. Maybe they don’t.”
Öhrstrand picks up that thread about being mentors and explains their wider strategies when preparing the film.
“We did different things with them, like take them to Brazilian jujitsu,” he says. “So they become like proper siblings. And another thing is that you have to break it down so they don’t overcomplicate the thing. Actors do that. ‘This is my character!’ Forget about the character. Work the scene. What is the scene about?”
At any rate, it all worked out. The film visited Venice and won that prize. Delbravo got to attend the event in a deconstructed dinner jacket. (That’s the best I can explain.) This is where we came in.
“You should never do something for a festival or prizes,” Gustafson says. “You should do it because you are curious.”
But it was fun.
“Yeah! It was great! It was great!”
Swedes know how to have a good time.
Paradise Is Burning is in cinemas from Friday, August 30th
