#Elvira Lind and Her husband | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thevibraniumveterans · 2 years

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So I found something earlier.

Elvira Lind - screenwriter, filmmaker, director, and co-creator of Mad Gene Media (which she runs with her husband Oscar Isaac) - took this photo of Isaac signing some things for a good cause:

And I spotted something familiar on his table…

It turned out to be this book right here:

I remember reading it, like once, and I really liked it! The fact that Isaac has likely read it himself, and deemed it special enough to auction off for a charitable cause? Oh, man, that’s awesome.

And also! Just late last month, in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Isaac has gone on record to state - when asked whether he read the 2016-2018 Star Wars: Poe Dameron run:

“I have, I got all of them. I was so excited: that was the first time a character of mine had been in a comic book - that I had created this character. So I was really excited to see that and read about his parents and yeah, that was a really special thing to see.”

What’s more, in an old interview with Polygon:

We have gotten to see a bit of Poe’s backstory in the Marvel comics series. Is that something you follow and does it affect your performance in any way?

“I’ve looked at them. I mean, they’re amazing artwork and really cool stories and it’s pretty amazing to see that. It’s great.”

Has it affected the way you play the character at all?

“I mean, it definitely enriches the character but, ultimately, my job is to take the script and do my best to tell that story. But what’s great about the comics is that it gives a richer tapestry to his life.”

This entire run, ALL 31 GLORIOUS ISSUES OF IT:

I also saw this little book on his table, amongst other things up for auction:

I wonder what’s in the book, as I’ve personally never read it myself (nor have I really heard of it until now 😅)

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tilbageidanmark · 9 months

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Movies I watched this Week #134 (Year 3/Week 30):

The Consequences Of Love, my 6th rewarding film by Paolo Sorrentino, an exceptional mature director. His usual collaborator Toni Servillo plays here a mysterious businessman, who's been staying alone for 8 years at a luxurious Lugano hotel. Rich, stylish and evocative. 8/10.

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4 more by Buñuel:

🍿 The Milky Way, the first of his loose "Search for truth" trilogy, (together with the much better 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' and 'The Phantom of Liberty'). Some intricate heretic and blasphemous polemics against the church - and all believers. Clear inspiration to Jodorowsky. “Thank God I’m an atheist.” 5/10.

🍿 Re-watch: Tristana, a complex tragedy about the patriarchy, innocence, sexuality, obsessiveness and cruelty, offered as a simple soap opera. Fernando Rey is the decadent aristocrat who seduces his young niece, the deceitful Catherine Deneuve, who perversely rebels against this father-husband. That Mustache guard! The artificial leg laying on bed! The Don Lope Bell clapper! 8/10.

🍿 Robinson Crusoe, his first color film, and the first made in English, was a traditional re-telling of the famous story, with (few) subversive elements.

🍿 "...See you at the top, gumdrop..."

The young one (1960) was Buñuel's second film in English, an uncomfortable, disturbing drama, now considered to be one of his forgotten masterpieces. A tense and very disturbing story: A black clarinet player who is falsely accused of rape, finds refuge on an island off the Carolina coast. An unpleasant gamekeeper forces himself on a 13 year old innocent girl (who looks remarkably like Liv Tyler). The two men end up playing a bitter battle-of-wills game, full of tense and racist scenes. An odd morality play examining prejudices, racism and pedophilia.

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The Letter Room, my first by Danish director Elvira Lind. She cast her real-life husband Oscar Isaac as a kind, mustachioed prison guard, who's assigned to go over the prisoners' mail. Ah, The American carceral system! The saddest film I've seen in a while. 9/10.

(Photo Above).

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“Eat the watermelon - it’s yours now”.

Cameraperson, my second superb documentary by elite cinematographer Kristen Johnson (after her incredible 'Dick Johnson is dead').

Johnson shot dozens of films, and this personal collage is a collection of some of her background leftover titbits, establishing shots and related stuff from all over the world. Extremely powerful, even before she breaks out stuff from the most tragic and harrowing places around the world: Guantanamo, Sarajevo, Jasper, Texas, Kabul, Nigeria, Yemen and Mississippi. So much heartbreaks and suffering, told with so much restrain. "Donba!" 9/10.

I discovered this in a short Thomas Flight essay 'The Succession Character You Never See' which describes how important the invisible camera decisions are.

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First watch: Closely Watched Trains, the groundbreaking Czech New Wave classic. Cute, light erotic story about Premature ejaculation and anti-Nazi resistance.

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A mighty wind, another of (Baron!) Christopher Guest's comedy-mockumentaries, this time about a television reunion of three folk bands from the 60's. With a scary-looking Harry Shearer (who later transition into a female), and all the members of the ensemble that made 'Spinal tap', 'Best in show' and others. Perfectly charming. 7/10.

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Loft, the standard 'Erotic thriller' from Belgium was the most successful Flemish-speaking film ever by 2008. 5 successful yuppies, duplicitous swinging dicks, own a fancy loft together, to which they bring their mistresses to. But they are all married, and claim to be faithful when in public. When a woman is found murdered in the loft, it's unclear who killed her or why. 3/10.

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Nine Queens is considered as one of Argentina's greatest films. A crime thriller of two small time street hustlers, who cross and double cross everybody around them again and again. With 2 surprising endings, one of which is typically Argentinian (The bank suddenly defaults!). 5/10.

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My 9th and 10th by Wes Anderson:

🍿 The Darjeeling Limited, a movie about designer suitcases; A visually-provocative but emotionally stunted drama about 3 irritating brothers on an exotic 'spiritual trip' to India. With the first (?) sex scene in any of his movies. All style, no substance. I don't know why I keep watching his films, when I find him empty and pretentious. 4/10.

🍿 Hotel Chevalier was a 12 minutes film he released together with 'Darjeeling', like a Pixar "Short". A prequel with some background about Jack Whitman and his ex-girlfriend. Like 'Prada: Candy', Anderson's perfume ad with Léa Seydoux, shorter is better. This is actually a perfectly little story with the same "Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?" comment. 7/10.

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The chase (1946), a second rate Noir by a second rate auteur. With Robert Cummings and Peter Lorre. 1/10.

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The Beguiled, a moody Southern Gothic thriller by Sofia Coppola, about a wounded Union Corporal who was given shelter at a small girls school in Virginia in 1864. My second film about amputation this week (After 'Tristana'!). But the slow melodrama didn't speak to me at all.

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In Ted Gioia's tribute to Tony Bennett, he claims that lounge-lizard Lou Canova is modeled after Bennett, at the lows of his career at that period. I haven't seen Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose since 1984. His cinematic personality as the 'nervous Jew' is highly-irritating. But Gordon Willis photography helped give the tight story 100% score on 'Rotten Tomatoes'.

Rip, Tony Bennett!

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Fieldwork Footage is a 1928 short directed by Zora Neale Hurston. She was a central figure of the 'Harlem renaissance', an author and anthropologist and the first African-American female film maker.

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I was sick for a day, so I watched Pineapple Express once again, the best action-stoner comedy ever? Convincing marijuana enthusiast Set Rogen against local mob guy Bill Lumbergh. It's a movie about escalation! Starts with weed jokes and ends with "Prepare to suck the cock of Karma" climax.

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The Quiet American, an adaptation of Graham Greene Foreign Service Saigon thriller, with Michael Caine and Brendan Frazer. The two engage in a ménage à trois over a pretty Vietnamese taxi dancer. This is 1952 when the CIA is just getting into the war there. Cinematography by Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-wai's usual collaborator. 3/10.

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In the 1960's and 70's, the Montmartre Jazz club on Store Regnegade in Copenhagen was the center of world class jazz in Europe. Many of the greatest names in Jazz played there regularly. Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Muddy Waters, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and of course the Danish bass player Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. Blues for Montmartre is a nostalgic 2011 Danish documentary about the place and the people who frequented it. 9/10.

Here is Ben Webster playing Stardust in Montmartre in 1971.

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Related!

That’s my jazz: Pastry chef Milt Abel ll reflects on his relationship with his late father Milton Abel Sr., a legendary Kansas City jazz musician.

Surprisingly, he went to work at Noma, and stayed in Copenhagen to open his own Danish-style bakery!

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Just because I dislike science fiction as a genre, does not mean that I'm not ready to give it another chance every once in awhile (But always to be disappointed!). Gattaca seemed to be different: Dystopian bio-punk about eugenics with Gore Vidal and Ernest Borgnine... But I only lasted 30 minutes inside this shiny, sterile world: Pseudo-intellectual mambo-jumbo, horribly acted.

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Throw-back to the "Art project”:

Adora with Buñuel.

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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uomo-accattivante · 3 years

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Excellent article about bringing a re-make of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage to fruition, and the twenty-year friendship that Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain share:

There were days on the shoot for “Scenes From a Marriage,” a five-episode limited series that premieres Sept. 12 on HBO, when Oscar Isaac resented the crew.

The problem wasn’t the crew members themselves, he told me on a video call in March. But the work required of him and his co-star, Jessica Chastain, was so unsparingly intimate — “And difficult!” Chastain added from a neighboring Zoom window — that every time a camera operator or a makeup artist appeared, it felt like an intrusion.

On his other projects, Isaac had felt comfortably distant from the characters and their circumstances — interplanetary intrigue, rogue A.I. But “Scenes” surveys monogamy and parenthood, familiar territory. Sometimes Isaac would film a bedtime scene with his onscreen child (Lily Jane) and then go home and tuck his own child into the same model of bed as the one used onset, accessorized with the same bunny lamp, and not know exactly where art ended and life began.

“It was just a lot,” he said.

Chastain agreed, though she put it more strongly. “I mean, I cried every day for four months,” she said.

Isaac, 42, and Chastain, 44, have known each other since their days at the Juilliard School. And they have channeled two decades of friendship, admiration and a shared and obsessional devotion to craft into what Michael Ellenberg, one of the series’s executive producers, called “five hours of naked, raw performance.” (That nudity is metaphorical, mostly.)

“For me it definitely felt incredibly personal,” Chastain said on the call in the spring, about a month after filming had ended. “That’s why I don’t know if I have another one like this in me. Yeah, I can’t decide that. I can’t even talk about it without. …” She turned away from the screen. (It was one of several times during the call that I felt as if I were intruding, too.)

The original “Scenes From a Marriage,” created by Ingmar Bergman, debuted on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman’s first television series, its six episodes trace the dissolution of a middle-class marriage. Starring Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s ex, it drew on his own past relationships, though not always directly.

“When it comes to Bergman, the relationship between autobiography and fiction is extremely complicated,” said Jan Holmberg, the chief executive of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

A sensation in Sweden, it was seen by most of the adult population. And yes, sure, correlation does not imply causation, but after its debut, Swedish divorce were rumored to have doubled. Holmberg remembers watching a rerun as a 10-year-old.

“It was a rude awakening to adult life,” he said.

The writer and director Hagai Levi saw it as a teenager, on Israeli public television, during a stint on a kibbutz. “I was shocked,” he said. The series taught him that a television series could be radical, that it could be art. When he created “BeTipul,” the Israeli precursor to “In Treatment,” he used “Scenes” as proof of the concept “that two people can talk for an hour and it can work,” Levi said. (Strangely, “Scenes” also inspired the prime-time soap “Dallas.”)

So when Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman’s youngest son, approached Levi about a remake, he was immediately interested.

But the project languished, in part because loving a show isn’t reason enough to adapt it. Divorce is common now — in Sweden, and elsewhere — and the relationship politics of the original series, in which the male character deserts his wife and young children for an academic post, haven’t aged particularly well.

Then about two years ago, Levi had a revelation. He would swap the gender roles. A woman who leaves her marriage and child in pursuit of freedom (with a very hot Israeli entrepreneur in place of a visiting professorship) might still provoke conversation and interest.

So the Marianne and Johan of the original became Mira and Jonathan, with a Boston suburb (re-created in a warehouse just north of New York City), stepping in for the Stockholm of the original. Jonathan remains an academic though Mira, a lawyer in the original, is now a businesswoman who out-earns him.

Casting began in early 2020. After Isaac met with Levi, he wrote to Chastain to tell her about the project. She wasn’t available. The producers cast Michelle Williams. But the pandemic reshuffled everyone’s schedules. When production was ready to resume, Williams was no longer free. Chastain was. “That was for me the most amazing miracle,” Levi said.

Isaac and Chastain met in the early 2000s at Juilliard. He was in his first year; she, in her third. He first saw her in a scene from a classical tragedy, slapping men in the face as Helen of Troy. He was friendly with her then-boyfriend, and they soon became friends themselves, bonding through the shared trauma of an acting curriculum designed to break its students down and then build them back up again. Isaac remembered her as “a real force of nature and solid, completely solid, with an incredible amount of integrity,” he said.

In the next window, Chastain blushed. “He was super talented,” she said. “But talented in a way that wasn’t expected, that’s challenging and pushing against constructs and ideas.” She introduced him to her manager, and they celebrated each other’s early successes and went to each other’s premieres. (A few of those photos are used in “Scenes From a Marriage” as set dressing.)

In 2013, Chastain was cast in J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,”opposite Javier Bardem. When Bardem dropped out, Chastain campaigned for Isaac to have the role. Weeks before shooting, they began to meet, fleshing out the back story of their characters — a husband and wife trying to corner the heating oil market in 1981 New York — the details of the marriage, business, life.

It was their first time working together, and each felt a bond that went deeper than a parallel education and approach. “Something connects us that’s stronger than any ideas of character or story or any of that,” Isaac said. “There’s something else that’s more about like, a shared existence.”

Chandor noticed how they would support each other on set, and challenge each other, too, giving each other the freedom to take the characters’ relationship to dark and dangerous places. “They have this innate trust with each other,” Chandor said.

That trust eliminated the need for actorly tricks or shortcuts, in part because they know each other’s tricks too well. Their motto, Isaac said, was, “Let’s figure this [expletive] out together and see what’s the most honest thing we can do.”

Moni Yakim, Juilliard’s celebrated movement instructor, has followed their careers closely and he noted what he called the “magnetism and spiritual connection” that they suggested onscreen in the film.

“It’s a kind of chemistry,” Yakim said. “They can read each other’s mind and you as an audience, you can sense it.”

Telepathy takes work. When they knew that shooting “Scenes From a Marriage” could begin, Chastain bought a copy of “All About Us,” a guided journal for couples, and filled in her sections in character as Mira. Isaac brought it home and showed it to his wife, the filmmaker Elvira Lind.

“She was like, ‘You finally found your match,’” Isaac recalled. “’Someone that is as big of a nerd as you are.’”

The actors rehearsed, with Levi and on their own, talking their way through each long scene, helping each other through the anguished parts. When production had to halt for two weeks, they rehearsed then, too.

Watching these actors work reminded Amy Herzog, a writer and executive producer on the series, of race horses in full gallop. “These are two people who have so much training and skill,” she said. “Because it’s an athletic feat, what they were being asked to do.”

But training and skill and the “All About Us” book hadn’t really prepared them for the emotional impact of actually shooting “Scenes From a Marriage.” Both actors normally compartmentalize when they work, putting up psychic partitions between their roles and themselves. But this time, the partitions weren’t up to code.

“I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.

She couldn’t hide how the scripts affected her, especially from someone who knows her as well as Isaac does. “I just felt so exposed,” she said. “This to me, more than anything I’ve ever worked on, was definitely the most open I’ve ever been.”

“It felt so dangerous,” she said.

I visited the set in February (after multiple Covid-19 tests and health screenings) during a final day of filming. It was the quietest set I had ever seen: The atmosphere was subdued, reverent almost, a crew and a studio space stripped down to only what two actors would need to do the most passionate and demanding work of their careers.

Isaac didn’t know if he would watch the completed series. “It really is the first time ever, where I’ve done something where I’m totally fine never seeing this thing,” he said. “Because I’ve really lived through it. And in some ways I don’t want whatever they decide to put together to change my experience of it, which was just so intense.”

The cameras captured that intensity. Though Chastain isn’t Mira and Isaac isn’t Jonathan, each drew on personal experience — their parents’ marriages, past relationships — in ways they never had. Sometimes work on the show felt like acting, and sometimes the work wasn’t even conscious. There’s a scene in the harrowing fourth episode in which they both lie crumpled on the floor, an identical stress vein bulging in each forehead.

“It’s my go-to move, the throbbing forehead vein,” Isaac said on a follow-up video call last month. Chastain riffed on the joke: “That was our third year at Juilliard, the throb.”

By then, it had been five months since the shoot wrapped. Life had returned to something like normal. Jokes were possible again. Both of them seemed looser, more relaxed. (Isaac had already poured himself one tequila shot and was ready for another.) No one cried.

Chastain had watched the show with her husband. And Isaac, despite his initial reluctance, had watched it, too. It didn’t seem to have changed his experience.

“I’ve never done anything like it,” he said. “And I can’t imagine doing anything like it again.”

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#oscar isaac #jessica chastain #scenes from a marriage #hagai levi #michelle williams #elvira lind #behind the scenes #article

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wyn-n-tonic · 2 years

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I love that you refer to Oscar as “Elvira Lind’s Husband” it makes me smile

i saw somebody call her 'Oscar Isaac's wife' once and lost my goddamn mind so now i refer to him as her husband. and he's proud of it. number one Elvira Lind fan.

#ask o

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oscarisaac-source · 3 years

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If you are interested in hearing Elvira talking about her filmmaking I recommend this interview. I really enjoyed hearing more about her background and her perspective on documentary making.

‘Award-winning filmmaker Elvira Lind discusses her Oscars shortlisted film, THE LETTER ROOM, which stars her husband, actor Oscar Isaac (STAR WARS). Jared Milrad chats with Elvira about her background in documentary filmmaking, her process of making the film in a real prison with her husband, her views on criminal justice reform and abolishing the death penalty, social impact filmmaking, and inclusion in entertainment.’

https://vimeo.com/520377573/description

#elvira lind #the letter room #oscar isaac

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foxilayde · 1 year

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#the way he looks at her 😭 they are so precious #Elvira Lind and Her husband #Oscar Isaac #short king 👑 😌

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nkp1981 · 3 years

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Elvira Lind has directed the Oscar-nominated short movie 'The Letter Room' starring her husband, Oscar Isaac. For the movie it was required that Oscar had a fake belly on, so he ran around pretending to be pregnant as his wife was, demanding weird food because he also had cravings.

Photo: Alisha Wetherill

#Oscar Isaac #poe dameron #the force awakens #star wars

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generalfinnpoe · 4 years

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Elvira Lind and her husband - oil on canvas 2020

#elvira lind #oscar isaac #SHE LOOKS GOOD IM

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zeldasayer · 4 years

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Elvira Lind & her husband are really having the most wonderful quarantine. Her Instagram stories are always so lovely, they’re just eating and painting and lounging. A dream.

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datapadz · 3 years

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hold up did elvira lind for real get nominated for an oscar before her husband this is AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!! THRIVING during women’s history month!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#★──if i had a life i'd hate it! ■ ooc #waiting for my boss at my new (eek) job to call me back #while ignoring everything at my current job as one does

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fuckyeahoscarisaac · 7 years

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On Compulsive Home-Movie-Making During Loss, Birth and Hamlet Bobbi Jene director Elvira Lind on the documentary she shot but may never show about a tumultuous year in her and husband Oscar Isaac’s life.

By Elvira Lind | September 20, 2017

It’s Sunday and one of those uncomfortable hot and humid days in New York that feels like walking around inside a dog’s mouth. Luckily I have spent the day mostly in the darkness of the Public Theater filming the early preparations for a Hamlet production my boyfriend Oscar and his buddy from Juilliard, Sam Gold, are putting together for the following summer.

Oscar works in movies mostly; he has been in many. In the five years we have been together, I have seen him die countless times. I have visited set and watched him get stabbed to death over and over the entire day. He has also been killed by a rocket explosion, by various kinds of knife wounds, by poison (twice), by self-inflicted gunshot to head (twice), drowning (almost), in his spaceship (again almost), from a strange and very fatal disease, from melting via telekinesis, and perhaps some more that I have now forgotten. He has had more haircuts and body shapes than anyone I have known. After years of having people scream “Action!” at him and going on endless press tours in soulless corporate hotel rooms, it’s great to see his excitement grow at the thought of getting back onstage in our adopted home town. This theater workshop week is the happiest I have seen him.

I have just spent three months in an edit room finishing a documentary and am desperate to be shooting something again. Filming from a new perspective helps clear my head. The actors and musician from the Hamlet workshop generously allow me inside with my camera to capture some of their work with my camera. Oscar and Sam want to keep some documentation of their Hamlet process for archival purposes (also known as future nostalgia). I film them playfully chew their way through Shakespeare’s tragedy in an explosion of creative energy. I am captivated by it.

During that week, I don’t think much of my sudden disgust with the smell of palo santo wood that Oscar insists on burning during the workshop. However, a handful of positive pregnancy tests that Sunday afternoon reveal why I have developed a sensitivity to this odor. The news is joyous to me since Oscar and I have agreed that having a baby would be a wonderful thing. However, in that moment of realization, it is also scary. I know that it will challenge my work as a documentary filmmaker in which I am used to traveling alone for long periods of time, always being ready to get up and go wherever the story I am working on dictates. This could become testing. However, in my thirties my primal instincts have slowly silenced that part of my brain that wanted to continue life as a lone wolf on the prowl for new stories to film. I will find a way to continue doing both, I assure myself. It has been done before.

It catches me off guard when Oscar arrives home earlier than I had expected that Sunday. He suddenly stands in the door of our apartment, and he looks so sad. Not like the guy I had said goodbye to at the theater that morning. He has received a call. His mom is ill, they didn’t know what it is yet, but it seems to be serious. He is frightened.

I have never seen anyone love their mom as much as Oscar loves his, an incredible lady, a fighter, a tough cookie. She balances soft and gentle with a great temper and sharp humor.

After a couple of hours of us both pacing up and down the apartment not knowing what to do, and me not knowing how to now share the news about my pregnancy, I eventually manage to whisper it to him. Like a shy child on her first day of school.

We sit on the terrace, in the last moments of the day’s sun, holding the best and the worst news at the same time.

For the next year, only three things happen in our life. Hamlet, Oscar’s mom’s fight against an aggressive cancer, and the baby who had decided to join us in the midst of this turmoil.

Sometimes life is a crazy, crazy ride, with birth and death plowing your timeline at the same speed. Like being hit by a hurricane, pants down. We hadn’t braced ourselves for the impact.

At first, we are completely numbed by what is happening. We take everything day by day, some days hour by hour, as things with Oscar’s mom get more serious. And then, at some point, I grab my camera and start shooting randomly. I convince myself that I am shooting footage to cover Oscar and Sam’s work on the Hamlet production. And yes, I am filming Sam and him figuring out how to tackle this beast of a play and Oscar becoming Hamlet. But rehearsing the role of a man deeply mourning his father’s death is very close to home suddenly. Simultaneously, I film trips to the hospital’s intensive care unit in Miami, lying upside down on the passenger seat, contorting my seven-months-pregnant bod, to get a good shot of Oscar rehearsing his Hamlet lines while he drives. Hamlet starts to become a small island that Oscar has been washed up on in the middle of this unbearable loss. I film when we can’t sleep, I film when more and more of Oscar’s family arrive with suitcases until we all live in the same house together. Day after day, they go through moments of such sorrow. They talk in Spanish and I struggle to understand the words but I understand the incredible intimacy they share, something we don’t share on that level in Scandinavia.

I film the dogs tanning in the sun, someone baking a cake for a birthday, Guatemalan meals being cooked loudly. Oscar on calls with his agent and the theater, trying to get Werner Herzog’s incredible Dutch cellist to be in the play. I film when Oscar sings to his mom after she loses consciousness, as the family watches the sunrise together the morning she passes away. The sky is bathed in colors. I keep filming when we have to return to our life in New York and I am a month away from birth. We make fun of my swollen body. I film when we plan a shotgun wedding with a handful of people on some friends’ roof on the only summer day in February. When I am 10 days overdue and my film premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival, it receives a bunch of awards and I have to record my acceptance speeches from the delivery room.

Our son arrives and again life is turned upside down. I keep filming when Hamlet comes to life in our home, comes to life on the stage and when Oscar practices having his life end with poison – for a third time in his career. I film as Oscar has to find a way through a play, for four hours every night, that is about the devastation of losing a parent.

I film our son growing bigger and bigger and the proud look in my husband’s eyes when he looks back at me through the lens. I film our lightest moments and our darkest moments. They are rubbing against each other, but the lightest begin to take over. I film incoherently and with no real aim in mind. I just record us, I record to get some distance and filter reality through my various camera lenses. My camera is always just sitting there ready to shoot. In the end, I don’t even ask before I shoot, I film people who are visiting us, the guy who works at the garage, Oscar when he is sleeping. Sometimes I don’t film anything for days and other times I film non-stop, even with my free arm while I am breastfeeding my baby with the other.

I wonder if people who work as accountants just work on numbers frantically in similar heated life moments.

Perhaps I film to digest my own reality. Seeing my life through my camera bit by bit somehow helps me.

I organize this footage in folders, I back it up on a second drive, I treat it like I do my other films. But I know that even though this may be the strongest, most honest and unfiltered footage I have ever captured, it will most likely never get seen by anyone.

I wonder how many stories sit out there, on a shelf for a lifetime, because it is just too close to the life of the one who filmed or wrote or composed it. Many, I imagine.

I ask so much of the people I film for my documentary films. I film my subjects in their most intimate moments. I barge into their lives and capture them while they are in the middle of making difficult life decisions, breaking up or about to make love. And yet, when I point the camera in my own life’s direction, I am cowardly and can’t imagine sharing it with anyone.

But, I guess, time will have to tell. The readiness is all.

Elvira Lind

Born in 1981 in Copenhagen, Elvira Lind graduated from City Varsity School of Media and Creative Arts in Cape Town in 2006, majoring in documentary film. She has worked within that field since directing and shooting documentaries of various lengths for TV, cinema, and web on 4 different continents. Elvira now lives and works out of New York, where she also writes on various fiction projects. Elvira’s first feature documentary, Songs for Alexis, competed at IDFA in 2014 and screened at a long list of international festivals; she received CPH:DOX new talent award in 2015; and her first international documentary TV series, Twiz and Tuck, launched on Viceland this year. Elvira’s second feature documentary, Bobbi Jene, premiered at Tribeca 2017 and is being released theatrically by Oscilloscope from September 22.

#oscar isaac #elvira lind #eugene #hamlet #new york #swnews*

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