Short interview: Johanna Wagner

How long did it take to make Peter in Radioland? Was it difficult to get financing?
5 months. It was funded through the Bridging the Gap scheme run by Scottish Documentary Institute.

Which thoughts come to mind concerning a “European cinema community”?
Exciting, rapidly expanding, distinct.

If you owned a theatre for one night, which films would you screen?
I would like to screen some works of Maya Deren, an avante-garde filmmaker from the 50s and 60s New York. I am very influenced by her style of filmmaking which was in its time, and still is, innovative. I am intrigued by her use of surreal imagery and how she plays a lot with the use of symbolic visuals to interpret psychological traumas. Being Swedish I would also show some of Lucas Moodysons films, a Swedish contemporary film maker who’s films have an ability to strike a cord in me, he portrays very well the anguish of growing up as a teenager with all that that entails.

What is your next project?
I would like to make an experimental fiction film for my next project. For this film I would like to include a lot of my inspiration I have drawn from the work of Maya Deren as mentioned above. I would like to make a surreal and dream-like interpretation of the mind of a schizophrenic, for example visualising hallucinations.
With every film I make, I try to push the boundaries of what I know as a filmmaker are the conventions of storytelling. Trying to get inside the characters’ minds would also be a challenge. A further challenge would be to make the audience aware of the fact that there are different approaches to storytelling.

Courtesy of European Film Academy, 2010.