Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.09.2015, Qupperneq 18

18 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2015
The films will be presented at the Nor-
dic House, in free screenings scheduled
for 1pm on October 3 and 4. Fríða Rós
Valdimarsdóttir, the project manager
for Stelpur filma, spoke to the Grape-
vine just after the workshops had been
completed, while the filmmakers, back
in school after the weeklong project,
rushed to lock picture.
“Of course you can be a
director”
I'm curious about the philosophy
behind the project. It seems partly
a response to some of the discus-
sion about the allotment of grants
awarded by the Icelandic Film
Centre, and the very low percent-
age of money that goes to women.
One of the questions that has been
raised in mitigation of those num-
bers is whether there are enough
women applying for grants to get
those numbers up. Is Stelpur filma
maybe an attempt to jumpstart the
next generation of potential grant
applicants?
In a way, but there have always been
women in the film industry—however,
they don't end up as directors. When
women are searching for opportunities,
they tend to be pushed towards other
tasks—kind of “making the coffee for
the director,” you know. We are up to
some kind of limit in the Icelandic film
industry now. I don't think women not
applying is the problem. Given some
kind of quota, I'm sure women would
apply more, if they could see the reason
to apply.
So a quota system would encour-
age more women to think of them-
selves as directors, rather than as
assistant directors or assistants to
the producer or things like that?
Like Margarethe von Trotta, one of the
honorary guests of RIFF this year: she
got started in the 1960s, but—I just saw
this old interview with her where she's
describing the same thing that I'm de-
scribing to you now. She saw some films
from the French New Wave and she said,
This is what I want to do. But she went
into acting. She didn't even think about
becoming a director, it didn't occur to
her at the beginning that women could
be directors.
It took some years for her to say to
herself, of course you can be a director,
and now she's one of the leading direc-
tors in Germany. She's 73, but I'm talk-
ing to women in the film industry today
saying the exact same thing, even in the
Icelandic Film Academy: “I just wanted
to be some kind of part of the film indus-
try.” They didn't know where, but after a
while thought, I can be a director, I want
to be a director. So we have the same
problem, what, fifty years later.
Girls rock!
The mentors at the workshop: did
you seek them out because in inter-
views they'd expressed an interest
in seeing greater diversity in the
film industry, because you thought
they'd be good teachers, or maybe
because you thought it'd be a thrill
for the workshop participants to
meet them?
All of that. RIFF and the City of Reykja-
vík have had similar courses before for
kids, not just for girls, so we know of var-
ious lecturers, teachers and filmmakers
that are willing to participate—it's not
a huge salary or anything like that. The
ideology was that we didn't want any
men to be there, but I broke that rule for
Baltasar Kormákur, because I thought it
would be great that a man with this ca-
reer that Baltasar has, I mean just right
now with the big film [‘Everest’]... He
arrived in Iceland around nine in the
morning and drove directly to us at the
Nordic House for his mentoring session,
and then had the Icelandic premiere of
'Everest' in the evening.
What was the workshop’s
structure?
On day one, screenwriter Margrét
Örnólfsdóttir gave a talk for an hour
or two, and then they worked on their
scripts. She was on-site to help them sim-
plify their ideas—of course they had big
ideas and a short time to make the film,
and to learn how to make a story into a
film is a huge process. The day after, it
was director Ísold Uggadóttir, the direc-
tor; she went through how take a script
and interpret it through a lens. How to
use zooms—what does it mean? Colours,
what do they mean? On Wednesday, it
was Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir talking about
editing, and day four was Baltasar.
Every day, we also had some games-
slash-tasks on the theme of equality,
about gender issues and what are their
privileges in life. That was led by Ás-
laug Einarsdóttir, who started the local
“Rock Camp for Girls”, called Stelpur
Rokka!. They've been building this ideol-
ogy, having only women there. The first
thing I did when I got this project was to
call her: “Can I do the thing you do, ex-
cept with film?” [Laughs]
Empowerment in a week
How was the labour divided in the
groups—was it entirely collabora-
tive, or did the students take on
different roles?
The only thing I thought about how
they would make the film was that they
should like the way they were making it.
Some decided that one should be the di-
rector; in other groups, all of them want-
ed to act—people don’t always wants
to be behind the camera, some of them
thought that would be the most boring
part. And then, there was one where
somebody didn't want to participate too
much except in the editing process—she
was good at that.
Did you observe very closely?
I was in the way—they were really work-
ing! But on the first day, Margrét talked
about how you have to be in love with
your idea. You have to stick with it. And
the same day, Áslaug discussed this de-
mon we always have on our shoulders—
maybe more so women than men—criti-
cising everything we do, and that we
have to be aware of this voice. And then,
on day two, there was one group that
wasn't sure if they had a good idea. They
had made the script already, and they al-
most changed their minds. We got them
to go through, using this method: “Are
we in love with it, do you want to change
it, is this the demon—who influenced
our not liking this idea now? Somebody
around us, or was it us?” So they went
through with it, started loving the idea,
and wound up not changing it.
What I've heard from parents, from
tutors, from Áslaug, from girls that have
been in Stelpur Rokka!, is that this em-
powerment, it only takes a week. To get
a platform, to get equipment... It's some-
thing out of the ordinary, and it works.
I've heard from teachers, the shy girls
are more open—to build on this feminist
approach; weaving together some kind
of political awareness, tutoring expres-
sion—blended together, it works.
Among the films making their world premiere at this year's
Reykjavík International Film Festival are eleven five-min-
ute shorts, made by eleven groups of 8th and 9th grade
girls from eleven different Reykjavík schools. The all-girl
“Stelpur filma” (“Girls Filming”) workshop was a joint ef-
fort of the Reykjavik City Department of education and
youth and and RIFF, part of the year's ongoing celebra-
tion of the centennial of women's suffrage in Iceland. In an
all-female environment—save for one celebrity guest—the
66 young filmmakers received instruction from industry
mentors, did workshops addressing gender and other so-
cial issues, and created their shorts.
Words by Mark Asch
Photo courtesy of “Stelpur filma”
Meet
The Filmmakers
Of The Future!
They are all girls!
Every one of ‘em!
Politics | Bright?RIFF | Gende , ender, gender