Tell us about your project. What is it about? What themes or questions does it explore?
My Year in Fiction is a psychological drama about the friendship between a creative writing teacher and her student. Jenny is a repressed art critic approaching middle age and having a crisis. Elvira is a charismatic, bipolar teenager and a talented aspiring writer, attending a course at a remote writing academy outside Stockholm. The women find a complicated friendship through a common impulse of escapism.
This film looks at the search for meaning through art but also interrogates the ways in which an artist can steal from others. My story explores the ethical conditions of writing, especially in autofiction, and the ways in which storytelling can be inherently exploitative of others and the world around you.
In the film, Jenny is made to choose between caring for another person as she is expected to or choosing herself for once. This is the crux of her midlife crisis, which she finds herself unable to reckon with honestly. Jenny and Elvira end up in a kind of twisted, co-dependent mother-daughter relationship. Can they be friends? In fact, can a writer ever really have friends?
How did you come to work on this topic, and why is it particularly important or interesting to you?
I enjoy drawing inspiration from real contexts that I know well and fictionalizing them. This is why I placed my story in a remote writing school where I had previously spent a year attending a writing course. Biskops Arnö is well known in the Nordics for hosting many great writers, including Karl Ove Knausgård, Sara Stridsberg and Tone Schunnesson. While working on my first draft of the script, I re-attended a course at the school, returning once a month for research, soaking in the atmosphere and spying on conversations.
Writing on site was incredibly rewarding not only because the island in Lake Mälaren is stunning, with its centuries-old oak trees, misty wheat fields, and forests, but also because the close readings were a great support for finishing my first draft.
In the story, I explore the idea of moral freedom in artistic practice as a kind of a devil. One that corrupts my protagonist, pulls her in a direction of selfishness and individualism, and ultimately leads her to a place where she is free, but alone. My own writing practice often begins in autofiction, and I am constantly figuring out how to balance it with my real life. The challenge of autofiction is that it demands truthfulness to your own perspective, even at the cost of betraying those who are closest to you.
Critics have argued that autofiction represents a trend of individualism or narcissism. I disagree. I think autofictive writing can be best thought of as a kind of social suicide. The artist gives up their most intimate details, and even the details of their friends and family, defying all normal conventions of privacy. The paradox of autofiction is that, often, the more revealing the writer is, the more successful their project becomes. Knausgård is a poster boy for autofiction for this reason. But what happens to the other people who enter this room of subjective experience and end up (mis)characterized? In the social media era, your personal brand is capital and the loss of control over that can feel like theft. But do we really need to make the choice between art and life?
As a Finland-Swede, my identity is more Nordic than Finnish, and I want to write about this experience that entails some estrangement and outsider perspective in both countries. I am enjoying creating a character that explores this experience and is driven by this specific kind of outsider experience.
I spent much of my twenties living and studying in Sweden. I share the language with Swedes but there are many cultural differences. Over time, I’ve become fascinated by the subtle cultural dynamics and the microaggressions that are connected to cultural stereotypes. These nuances often inform my writing, especially in scenes that explore group dynamics and expectations of social power.
How do you see Kehittämö helping you get closer to your goals as a filmmaker?
I’ve been working steadily towards making my first feature film ever since I graduated from the MFA in Film at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg in 2022. Over the past three years, I’ve focused on writing multiple scripts, directing a drama series for YLE, and participating in Nordic Film Lab to develop my ideas and expand my network. I also had the opportunity to write full time for a year, supported by a grant from Svenska Kulturfonden.
Currently, writing and directing my debut feature film, My Year in Fiction, is at the heart of my work, and I’m looking forward to “My Year in Kehittämö”. Not many debut features get financed each year, and Kehittämö offers both the support and the conditions to make the script strong enough to be one of them. There is no outer excuse for the script not to be great. It’s now on me, and I’m here to give it my best.
A long-time dream of mine has also come true: I now have a mentor. Script consultant Nayeem Mahbub is joining the project, and I’m excited to see what sustained mentorship can bring to the process. Kehittämö also gives me and my producer, Jenni Jauri, a chance to work closely and build a solid foundation for the film together. Having studied mostly abroad, I see Kehittämö as a meaningful step in establishing myself more firmly here at home, in Finland.