05/10/2015 - The Swedish Film Institute is supporting new features by Pichler, Amanda Kernell and Saara Cantell

Swedish director Gabriela Pichler, whose feature debut, Eat Sleep Die [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: China Ahlander
interview: Gabriela Pichler
interview: Nermina Lukac
film profile] (2012), won both the International Critics’ Week and the Audience Awards in Venice, adding four Guldbagges – Sweden’s national film prize – is preparing her next film, Invasion!

“The camera – a gun with infinite ammunition, but limited battery,” is her intro to the Anna-Maria Kantarius production for Garagefilm International, where (as in her first oeuvre) she will work with first-time actors on location, this time from a script written by herself and Swedish author/playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri. 

Invasion! has received production funding from the Swedish Film Institute, which has also supported Amanda Kernell’s Sámi Blood [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Amanda Kernell
interview: Lars Lindstrom
film profile] (from Nordisk Film Production Sverige) and Saara Cantell’s Tacit Wisdom (Götafilm International).

Produced by Lars Lindström, Kernell’s Sámi Blood is her first feature, for which she also wrote the screenplay – she has so far directed five shorts, most recently Northern Great Mountain (2015), which was also about Sámi people. The film is set in 1930s Sweden, where Elle Marja goes to a Sámi boarding school; after racial biology examinations at the school, she decides to break away from her Sámi identity and become Swedish – a decision that proves harder to realise than she thought.

Also a feature debut, Cantell’s Tacit Wisdom – co-scripted by Finnish writer Leena Virtanen – deals with witchcraft on Sweden’s Åland Islands in the 1630s. Christer Nilson will produce the drama with Norway’s Pomor Film; the movie will be about a hunt for women “in league with the Devil”, which the new governor and the Church instigate. One after another, innocent fortune-tellers and healers are brought to court and sentenced to death. Filming will start this month.