The waiting time for gender-affirming surgery at one of Denmark’s three Centres for Gender Identity can be up to four to six years, according to the website of the centre in Copenhagen. At the same time, the intimate embrace of non-heteronormative love – both platonic and romantic – offers, for trans people, a safe haven to deal with these barriers. Combining rigorous social commentary with a tender romance, Danish director Mathias Broe dramatises these throughlines in Denmark in his debut feature, Sauna [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Mathias Broe
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Cineuropa: You self-describe as a queer filmmaker. What is your approach to creating queer stories on screen, and how does Sauna feed into this?
Mathias Broe: I’ve been wanting to do queer cinema since I graduated from film school, and I really wanted to create something that I felt represented my own experience as a queer person. […] The really interesting thing was that a year into the process, as we were writing the script and trying to board primarily queer people for the project, my own partner started transitioning. The film was part of an already existing story from a book [by Mads Ananda Lodahl], but it was also becoming my own story. It also really helped me kind of go through my own transition because they say that when your partner transitions, you also transition yourself.

Could you talk about the casting and finding the right actors for these two main roles?
It was really important for me to find, of course, a trans actor for the role of William. We started there because it was the brick that we needed in order to build the whole cast. It was a really tough job, actually, because there are so few trans actors in Denmark, and taking on a main part in a feature is a big task. I really wanted to open up the process, so we did an open casting and searched the entire country for people who wanted to be part of the film. In the end, we went with Nina Rask, who is quite a famous person in Denmark. She's a comedian and an actor and is trans. […] With Johan, I also really wanted to cast queer people, but in the end, we actually ended up going with an actor called Magnus Juhl Andersen. For me, the big thing is always to make sure that you do your research right, and you make an effort so that the people that should tell the story actually tell the story. But in the end, I also want to acknowledge who tells the story in the best way, and he was definitely the right choice for that part.

There is a larger conversation happening in the industry about intimate scenes, and there are certainly a few in the film. Could you talk about your approach?
I had a really close collaboration with my intimacy coordinator, Anne Sofie [Steen Sverdrup], in Denmark. She has [a collective] called Bedside Productions, and they primarily do porn, but in a very different way than you would normally do porn. They engage the local community, queer community and the underground scene in Copenhagen to be able to create parties that are a little bit more sex-positive. […] We worked with this red, yellow, green working method where green is “okay”, yellow is “be aware” and red is “no go”, and then you never cross these boundaries. […] I wanted to be able to recognise what I experience myself in queer spaces, in intimate situations – I wanted to make sure that the bodies that we have are actually being portrayed and seen on screen.

Is there a larger conversation in Denmark that’s happening that you’re trying to speak to with regard to gender-affirming care?
I have a lot of friends who have gone through the process of getting a medical transition, and I also have been a part of my own partner’s medical transition. The issue is that there's been a really long waiting time. There’s been this feeling of having to really defend who you are and having to go through a lot of difficult processes to even get to the point where people actually believe that you're speaking from an honest perspective.

You use a lot of dramatic cinematographic choices to distinguish between spaces, such as the shadowy sauna versus the outside world and the club.
At the beginning of the film, I wanted to have the feeling that everything in these spaces is claustrophobic and dark. A lot of the cis gay culture is a bit stuck in time and still stuck in this notion of secrecy and cruising, drawing from the time when people had to hide. Then, as Johan meets William, his world is expanding, and he's getting insight into a community that represents something else that he is actually also longing for. He's longing for deep conversations and love. In the middle of the film, when they're opening up to each other and having these intimate days together, [I thought] that should be very light, colourful and way more open.