Staubwelt tells the story of an unusual encounter between a police inspector nearing the end of her career and the Devil, who has come to Earth. Could you tell us more about what inspired you to tell it?
In recent years my mother has become a very central presence in my life. She moved back to Finland after having a heart attack in Sweden. She has a very particular melancholy, something accumulated through life, through disappointment, guilt, tenderness, and survival. At some point I felt that this could be the material of a film. Not her biography exactly, but the atmosphere around her. The fiction came later. The police inspector, the Devil, the darkness, and the mystery were ways of giving shape to what was already there.
Your mother, Vivan Groskind, did not just inspire the film, she actually plays the main role of the investigator Agnes. How did this collaboration go? Do you often work together?
We have made a short film together before, so this was not our first collaboration. She is not a professional actor, but she has a rare ability to be completely present in front of the camera. With her, I do not feel that I have to create a character from the outside. A lot is already there in her face, her voice, her body, and in how she moves through the world. The process was quite simple. We walked a lot at night during April and May, and a little in autumn, and invented the film as we went along. I usually had one printed page with shots and some fragments of dialogue, and then we tried things out together.
Beyond the plot, the film is imbued with a very unique atmosphere—twilight, slow-paced, melancholic—which owes much to the film’s cinematography. What were your aesthetic choices?
The film was shot mostly in my immediate surroundings, on the eastern side of Helsinki. It is not the most picturesque part of the city. Some of the architecture is quite soulless, but that interested me. I did not want the film to look romantic in an obvious way. I thought about 1970s German films, hence the German title, and also Chantal Akerman’s Meetings with Anna, where Anna moves through places and encounters different people, and the drama is often in the duration of those encounters rather than in the events themselves. I wanted the film to happen mostly in darkness, because it felt more intimate and calm. There are fewer people around, and more room for strange meetings. Of course, shooting darkness in late spring in Finland is not the most practical decision, since the days are already very long. We were also usually just two people, me and Saarlotta Virri, my editor and line producer. These limitations became the style of the film.
The Devil appears more as a guardian angel for Agnes than as a personification of evil, which runs counter to more conventional representations of the figure. What interested you about this particular interpretation, and about portraying this relationship with her? How did you develop this character in collaboration with filmmaker and actor Shamsil Balkis?
I wanted him to feel like a spiritually tired visitor from another order of existence, someone who is misunderstood. We also thought about how Beelzebub, originally a Philistine deity, was later demonised by Christians in order to discredit other beliefs. With Shamsil Balkis, the character developed quite intuitively. Shamsil has a softness and intelligence that made it possible to avoid the usual clichés. Their relationship is not romantic in a simple sense, and not maternal either. It is more like two exhausted beings recognising something in each other.
Staubwelt borrows from several film genres, sometimes with explicit references—fairy tales (Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast), science fiction (Terminator), film noir, experimental cinema—as well as Greek mythology. What does this mix of genres reflect? Would you say, as you did about your previous film XXL (made with Kim Ekberg, who is also a producer here), that the fantastic is “an ode to realism”?
I like when a film is not only one thing. I suppose that is how my brain works too. I gather things from different places and hope that something interesting happens when they contaminate each other. I like Akerman, but I also like Terminator, and I do not really see why they should not be allowed to meet. For me, the fantastic can be an ode to realism, yes, but not realism as a style. More realism as a way of approaching experience. Real life is not cleanly realistic. It contains dreams, superstition, television, childhood memories, religious fragments, bad architecture, genre images, and private mythologies. A strictly realistic form can sometimes feel less truthful than a form that allows those things to enter. Genre helps with that. It lets a police story become a fairy tale, or a fairy tale become something close to social realism, without the film having to explain itself too much.
Another element that contributes to the film’s fantastical dimension is that, although the characters speak different languages (Malayalam, Finnish, Swedish, and French), they seem to understand one another without any difficulty. Could you elaborate on this multilingual and polyglot aspect?
I was raised in a multilingual environment. My father was American and my mother is Finnish-Swedish, so it has always felt normal to me that people speak different languages and still understand each other, or at least understand enough. They use the language they feel closest to. In cinema I find it a little strange when everyone has to agree on one practical language, as if intimacy depends on efficiency. At first Agnes and the Devil spoke more English together, but it did not feel right. It became less intimate. I think people are more present in front of the camera when they can use their own language. In this film, multilingualism also belongs to the dream logic of the Devil. The characters understand each other because the film allows it, or because something has already been understood before language arrives.
The music evokes a kind of subterranean presence, through this chorus of whispered voices. How did you work with the composers?
Micke and Johannes (Cedlind/Hagman) are our trusted composers at Post Post AB. They started producing material very early, before we had even started filming, and working with sound and music became one of my favourite parts of the process. At first they made pieces that were sometimes very beautiful, maybe too beautiful. Combined with the subtle and laconic acting style, the emotion became too strong and almost funny. The film could not survive too much beauty. It started to look embarrassed. So we moved towards something more atmospheric, something that felt as if it came from underneath the film rather than being placed on top of it. The whispered voices were important because they do not behave like ordinary music. They feel more like a memory, or pressure, or people speaking from another room. I wanted the music to be another presence in the film, not a commentary on the emotions.
Interviewed by Louise Martin-Papasian
