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Projects

Grasshopper

Free-spirited Luka plays all summer, despite an uncertain future and the looming end of the world.

synopsis

The Baltic island of Bornholm, Denmark. Restless Luka (fifteen, she/they) doesn’t want to continue their education – or do anything else productive. The world is on its last legs – what’s the point of pretending? Too young to legally drop out, Luka is enrolled in an internship rotation programme to try different jobs and futures. Between summer parties, Luka reluctantly learns the ergonomics of cleaning, entertains cruise ship visitors at the local farm museum, and follows milk production around the island. As the island opens up to them, Luka finds alliances in unexpected places: plants, rocks, waters. They spin their own ideas of value, work, sex, and nature. They swim, climb, are blown by the wind. They pursue forbidden love – curly-haired Frida, a young motorbike aficionado in tractor-town Klemensker. Algae blooms in the ocean and F16s overhead remind Luka that everything precious and beautiful can just as easily be lost. At a rave on the south beach, the island’s power grid is sabotaged. During the ensuing blackout and sudden stop of everything, Luka is surprised to find that they do care deeply and know how to stand, strongly, and fully be themselves.

Director’statement

A modern retelling of Aesop’s famous fable, Grasshopper is inspired by my work with youth on Bornholm and their complex feelings of hope and precarity. The story explores their options in a rural fishing community that has been impacted by climate change, extractive luxury tourism, and the rapid militarisation of the Baltic. All the fish are gone. What utopias might we draw against the dark? I make films with an appreciation of slowness and being present, to physically experience the bodies and natural environments of my characters in a sensual, phenomenological way. Scenes are created between the actors, non-actors, and their locations to allow a flow between fiction and non-fiction elements. Community members engage differently with their own spaces through the narrative framework of the film. This creates an experience that is subjective, dreamy, tactile, fused with the real environment, and (I hope) can inspire a feeling of freedom, possibility, and light that might call us all to action after the curtains close.

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