Ukulele meets whistling, with a string orchestra recorded in Berlin – bittersweet, melancholic, warm. Presence is everything in this score, even when the characters are disoriented.
Director
David Wnendt
Premiere
Sundance Film Festival, Premieres section
Production
Beachside Films
Cast
Jenny Slate, Alex Sharp, Zach Galifianakis, Gillian Anderson
Synopsis
Frances, a young painter from New York, flees a failed show and her family’s cramped apartment for an artist residency in the Norwegian Arctic, where the sun never sets. Under the gruff painter Nils she paints a barn yellow – and meets Yasha, a young man from Brooklyn who has come to bury his father with a Viking funeral.
Interview
“David and I have a process where neither of us knows what we are going to do – all we know is that we will find it out together. The sound came out of the characters. For Frances it was an airy whistling – me whistling, combined with a synthesizer, so you cannot quite tell what it is – together with a ukulele, warm but also cute. For Yasha, who looks a little like a Beatle in his suit, an electric guitar and bass from the sixties and seventies, recorded through amps. And for Norway not Norwegian music, but the cold and the air you see in the pictures: a guitar viol through effects, and a small chamber orchestra in Berlin playing in a way we had agreed before the session – a more dead, but warm sound. They added something I could only have dreamed of.”