My Darling Supermarket

As a director I am very attracted to ideas, which allow me look deeply and explore places and characters who are not often playing the principle roles on the stories most popularly told in documentary filmmaking. I believe untraditional and apparently mundane locations can be as powerful and fascinating and a territory for finding extraordinary stories. For me, as a director, the exercise of peeling through the hidden layers of the our daily world is something that can be done in a very artistic manner and with a powerful dramaturgy. My creativity is triggered when these boundaries are pushed.
I love to quote a line from the wonderful short film by Errol Morris “The Umbrella Man” that really captures what is for me the spirit of documentary filmmaking and what I also feel is true for what I look for with “Have a nice day!”.
“In historical research there must be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension. If you put any event through a microscope you will find any dimension of completely weird and incredible things going on.” Said the character in the beginning of the film.
An ordinary every day like supermarket, that could have been set anywhere in the world, was for me that microscope, hiding an unknown, bizarre and marvelous dimension – invisible to any regular costumer.
Coincidently one of my main characters also talks about quantum physics in the film and the nature of reality while serving bread at the bakery counter. He describes a famous quantum mechanics experiment called: The double split experiment, which refers to how micro particles behave differently depending if there is an active viewer observing them or not. The philosophy behind what he is describing truly fascinates me.
Like in the quantum physics experiment, to me the nature of reality is far more interesting when we are looking at the small, the microscopic particles, which prove to not be so small after all, but actually quite intriguing in the unpredictable way in which they behave.

After spending many making what we like to call an existential film set in a supermarket, my crew and I have developed a curious complicity: When we are shopping at a supermarket and hear the phrase “Anything else?”, an unsettling sensation is evoked. Those words have acquired a new meaning, it is as if we were being asked: “What more is there to this world?”

It feels so funny, strange and wonderful at the same time. It is that feeling of being dazzled. Stories can touch us in a way that makes us feel more alive and more connected to our environment and even to each other. I believe documentary is very much about humanizing the word.
I feel like I’ve found something to really fall in love with in making this film. The supermarket became a wonderful metaphor for talking about our quests as human beings, the limits of our universe; our emotional prisons and our needs for affection and understanding.
There’s a really powerful line from one of the characters: “Fantasy brings more reality to the imperfections of life.”
My ambition with this film is to enable it to completely dissolve the space of the supermarket as a physical boundary – and to create a ballet, a dance of reality full of character, drama and poetry.

My Darling Supermarket was selected for:
- Bertha Fund 2014 for development IDFA;
- Took part in IDFASummer School 2015, for project development under the mentorship of Viktor Kossakovsky;
- Pitched at Sheffield doc fest Meet Market 2019;
- Won IBF Europe International co-production 2019 – with The Good Company /Denmark;
- Took part in IDFA Summer School 2018, for editing consultancy under the mentorship of Pirjo Honkasalo.