26/10/2022 - Cineuropa talked with the festival and programme director of the new Norwegian international gathering whose aim is to focus on the art of cinema

The second edition of Mirage has just wrapped (see the news), and the new international film festival in Oslo, dedicated to the art of cinema, managed to welcome more guests than ever before and appeal to an even wider audience. We had a chance to chat about this special year with Racha Helen Larsen, the festival and programme director of Mirage, and get her input on this year’s edition, the event’s approach to the industry and what the future will bring for the young Norwegian gathering.

Cineuropa: What was the main driving force for you to start a film festival, especially in the post-pandemic era?
Racha Helen Larsen: The idea and the concept behind Mirage started long before the pandemic, but we had been struggling to find the time and energy to make that plan come to life. Even though it was a rough and overwhelming first year in 2021, the pandemic gave us time to start planning this properly. All of the film projects we had been working on were put on hold, and it felt like the right time to get going with this wild idea!

What differentiates Mirage from other documentary festivals?
From the start, our mission with Mirage has been to build a home and a community for uncompromising films with a highly cinematic approach and filmmakers who, despite the challenges of funding and distribution, keep pushing and challenging film language, making fantastic films that also challenge our audience. The festival was initiated by filmmakers, and we want to draw attention to the creatives behind the filmmaking process – the fantastic editors, cinematographers, sound designers, directors, musicians and so on who contribute to the collaborative art of cinema.

You mentioned that Mirage celebrates the art of the real: could you elaborate on what that means to you and why it is important to focus on reality?
That’s a difficult question. We have tried to take a step back from the terms “reality” and “documentary”, or even “non-fiction”, as that label immediately takes the focus away from the principal thing: that film is a dialogue between image and sound, created and processed by millions of different methods and techniques, brought to an audience in a movie theatre. The term “Art of the Real” was our way of saying that many of the films that we programme deal with a relationship to “reality”, but underline the fact that documentary is an art form and should be labelled according to its cinematic qualities. That said, we have already had three hybrid films in our programme, and the methods of the filmmakers and the way these films were made were really fascinating and mesmerising, also with regard to the tag: reality.

This was also the inaugural edition of the Professional section, which is more industry-orientated and focused on the craft of filmmaking [see the news]. What was the feedback you received from this experiment, and how will you continue this in the future?
Our mission when creating Mirage was to make a home for exactly that: a hub for the creatives, professionals and the people behind the artistic craft of filmmaking. Sometimes, the editor or the cinematographer is the key to a fantastic film, and we want Mirage to be dedicated to these people. We talked to several of our guests who are widely experienced and acknowledged for their work, but who had never been invited to a festival through the numerous films they have contributed to. Through Mirage Professional, we aim to make a space where attendees can learn from each other's experiences and methods, and share ideas and inspiration. We also wanted it to be an artistic breeding ground for new projects, collaborations and possible co-productions.

What were the highlights for you at the second edition of Mirage, and what would you like to keep or change for the upcoming editions?
We loved seeing the completely sold-out Foley workshop with world-renowned Foley artist and sound designer Heikki Kossi. To see that our audience was interested in and curious about the way cinema is made, and was fascinated by the world of cinema, is excellent news. In general, we had an overwhelming and unexpected amount of tickets sold and festival passes distributed at this year's festival. Our industry sessions piqued the interest of the film industry here in Norway, with guests coming from outside Oslo. And we already know about some creative collaborations that have started just because of meetings held during Mirage.

I believe that the highlight for me was to see such a huge overall interest from the audience and to see the whole festival experience with people socialising between screenings. This is a festival director’s dream: to see the social effect of the festival as a place for the binge-watching of cinema. We will keep working on the social framework and the content around each film for next year, and will keep expanding our Professionals section, for which we have a very specific, undisclosed five-year plan.