Directors ´ thoughts

 

A few years ago I found myself in a life crisis, a darkness that was so bottomless that there wasn't even a glimmer of light. Deep depression and burnout as a result of too much stress but also the lack of filter, a high sensitivity and inability to switch off. Everything went straight in. Crossing between different realities, an openness and a longing for presence and life which in the end instead resulted in the opposite; total absence, exclusion and emptiness. The feeling of being in a glass dome and watching life go on outside. What happens if, after driving too fast on a highway for too long without knowing where you are even going, you are forced to stop? I had to start over, to learn to live in a new way. I took the same walk every day, out in the fields below my house, through the woods, the same distance. But still never the same. Every day the world felt different and slowly the outlines began to emerge again from the thick fog.

 

 

I began to look back on my life and for the first time in many years had time to think and think. I went through old hard drives with filmed material from trips in the 90s and remembered the heightened sense of life I experienced as a young person, the experience of time and presence. I return more and more often to the trips I took in my late teens. The heightened sense of life. Meetings and experiences that sometimes become decisive for the rest of one's life, which direction one takes. I remembered meetings with strangers who shared their fates. Reminded of how important art is, not least when going through crises. What cannot be expressed in words. The film therefore contains several references to artists and poets such as Jila Mossaed, Lotte Laserstein, Edward Munch, Ghayath Almadhoun, Fernando Pessoa.

 

 

One day my niece Siri, then three years old, said to me

"Aunt Sara, do you know that I am all alone inside my own head".

We live in a complex reality and are thrown between different realities. Seeing the world colored through such different filters.

But we are all many, have so many layers and voices within us. "Each one is many", as the poet Pessoa writes.

 

I wanted to make a film where I express and portray the darkness, both personal and collective. But a film that also contains the beautiful and bright. The contrasts that constantly exist side by side.

Shards is a film that moves from the small to the big world, between darkness and light in constant mood swings. A longing to stop and stare. To break your loneliness and experience a sense of belonging, with others, with something bigger. We all live on such different planes, constantly commuting between different realities.

 

This quote by Rumi is central to the film's theme;

The truth was a mirror that fell from God's hands and was smashed to the ground. Every human found a little shard and thought they possessed the whole truth.

 

What I want with my films is to portray something that is hopefully universal through personal experiences and a subjective view. "What is the bottom in you is also the bottom in others" as Gunnar Ekelöf said. Although I use my own experiences in my films, the private is completely uninteresting to me. At the same time, everything we do is personal because we can never escape ourselves, unless we delegate everything to AI.