PIPPI

Writer's Statement:
From 1998 to 2000, I lived in a municipality next to Stockholm. I loved everything there: underground grocery stores, recess in the woods, dressing up for St. Lucia’s Day. Later, my mom told me that I had a difficult time. The school where I kissed my first crush (a
young Norwegian boy) was the same place where other white boys mocked my small “Oriental” eyes. In 2014, Sweden re-released the 1969 Pippi Longstocking television series and removed a few
racial slurs, including the phrase “king of the Negroes” and a sequence where Pippi draws her eyes out into the slant eye gesture and sings a mock Chinese song. There was a large backlash; many Swedes believed this censorship corrupted a national treasure and reflected a submission to the “politically correct” atmosphere. The fusion of these events spurred what would eventually become PIPPI. What is our relationship with our past, and specifically nostalgia, as we evolve as a society? At what point does memory become oppressive and selective and harmful? And how do we talk about the past with the people we love?
Aesthetically, PIPPI is a horror film. When I wrote the script, I asked myself: what is the scariest thing I could see on screen that I haven't seen yet? I wanted to delve into the racial self-hatred that I, and many other Asians, have been experiencing for a long time.
But PIPPI's beating heart is just that -- heart. A child’s love for an icon, a mother’s love for her past, and the strong, albeit complicated, bond between them. I think of that scene in Slumdog
Millionaire when the young boy gets stuck in an outhouse while his favorite idol comes to town. In a moment of desperation and intense longing, he takes the ultimate plunge: into the
bath of shit below. Then he runs through the village, down the dirt roads, through the dense crowd, until he's there, in front of the person he wants to see most. Sometimes, the most
painful thing is wanting something badly enough.

Director's Statement: When I first read the script for PIPPI on March 9, 2020, I knew instantly I wanted to direct it. Karoline’s screenplay celebrates the joy and strength of an iconic “shero” figure, especially as something that bonds a mother and daughter, and when least expected, complicates both. I am drawn to stories with uncomfortable gray areas that force the audience to think beyond its constructed binary of good and evil. PIPPI immediately drew me into the mind of 8-year-old Jessa and her experience of this complexity.

Three days after I read PIPPI, New York City shut down. At first, it seemed impossible to shoot a film. But as America’s racial wound split open, PIPPI felt more relevant than ever, reckoning with racial identity in a way I had not seen on film before. We began discussing how to make the film as soon and as safely as possible. The original script featured a classroom setting. We shifted this to an outdoor playground and limited the number of children in the scene. We embraced these limitations of our situation and invited a COVID-safety certified line producer to join us. We were overwhelmed by the support from our cast, crew, and everyone who rallied behind us, supercharged by the story and its timeliness.

I was very interested in PIPPI’s intense psychological elements. I wanted to explore how Pippi Longstocking had been burned into the mind’s eye of both Jessa and her mother. This heroine lived in their psyches, the way that dominant culture so often does. The media and icons we consume as children stay with us and become baked into our consciousness. When discussing the tone of our film, Karoline often had instincts toward objectivity, an observer looking in, wanting to treat the story as an “every(wo)man” narrative. I tended towards the more experiential, wanting the camera to be the character’s eyes trying to understand the characters’ experiences. (Re)watching the original Swedish TV show became a guidepost. Although its main aesthetic is observational, there are moments when the camera enters Pippi’s POV. We were inspired by this stylistic blending, which has contributed to the off-kilter nature and dynamic tension. We’ve leaned into this discomfort, creating a viewing experience that not only reflects the process of racial reckoning but also hints at the nature of transformation itself.

**Please see our EPK which gives important insight into the film and features a conversation between us about PIPPI. **