This week’s Staff Pick Premiere, “Shadow Animals” by Jerry Carlsson captures the curiosity and strangeness of human behavior through the eyes of Marall, a young girl at an adult dinner party. The award-winning film examines social rituals in a way that feels familiar yet foreign, and incredibly cinematic.
Told through Marall’s curious eyes, the film reminds us what it was like to observe the adult behavior as children and outsiders. The mystery of the adult world becomes increasingly alarming and a unique choreography takes hold and a strange shadow appears.
Carlsson employs an absurdist realism that “invites the audience to observe themselves but with some distance. It is a way to look at the world and investigate it by picking it apart and reassembling it as an alternative version. By doing so we can also see our own behavior from a new perspective.”
In honor of today’s premiere, we reached out director Jerry Carlsson to learn more about “Shadow Animals” and his process. Read on for more of what he had to say:
On the film’s inspiration:
“Shadow Animals” started with a single image that I saw in my head. It was an image of a woman standing in a living room with her fist stuck inside of a man’s mouth, not able to pull it out. We started to explore it and from this image we developed the entire film, piece by piece. I knew early on that I wanted to explore dance on film, and that I wanted to do something playful and absurd regarding human behavior. I’m always inspired by human behavior. In this film, I wanted to investigate humans as social herd animals, and our need to belong to a group in order to exist and survive. How we imitate and adapt to others around us. The fear of being excluded sometimes becomes so strong that we go against our own will and nature, just in order to fit in.
On capturing the perspective of a child:
The child was not in the script until late in the development and It was the last major piece of the puzzle that made me understand the entire film. It just made perfect sense and with that piece everything else fell into place. I needed the perspective of an outsider to this group of dinner guests, someone that belongs to the group but still has not decoded and understood all the social rituals. An outsider that observes what happens, as the audience does. Everything we see in this film is her experience and memory of what happened that evening, a memory we as an audience get to experience and relive.
On the choreography:
Dance and film share a lot of great qualities as art forms, they are both based on rhythm and movement. With “Shadow Animals” I wanted to create a film where dance and acting merge together, into one language. Together with the Gothenburg Opera Dance company we investigated social rituals, such as greeting, dinner, dancing and mating rituals. We picked them apart piece by piece and we used the pieces to build our own social rituals, that resembled the original ones but were slightly absurd. As if we saw them for the first time, not yet fully decoded but still eerily familiar.
I also looked at animals for inspiration and tried to find similarities between their rituals and ours. The dancing scene in the living room is actually based on animal mating videos, specifically flamingo mating ritual. It is interesting to see the similarities of humans dancing in a club looking for a mate, and flamingos doing the same.
On casting:
With kids you can’t really just meet them once and judge their acting abilities. It’s more about getting to know each other and building trust, and for me to figure out what direction works for their acting. Ayla Turin, the lead actor, had never acted before and after meeting her a couple of times it was just extremely obvious that this was her film. There was no one else who could play the character like her.
During a walkthrough on location, she experienced and imagined everything she had read in the script, without anyone else being there. When we came to the stairs to the basement, she asked me to wait upstairs so she could explore the basement herself. I hesitated for a second since the basement actually was very scary, but she really wanted to do it herself. So I saw her walking down to the dark basement, alone. Ayla was down there by herself for ten minutes or so until she came back upstairs, very excited about her scary adventure. She had this amazing imagination and created a genuine experience of the scenes every time she did them.
On the challenges of getting the film made:
One of the challenges during the shooting was definitely time. It is an ambitious film with a lot of choreography, a big cast with both actors, dancers, a child lead actor and a shadow character. At one stage we also had a deer in the script, but that was removed before the final version. But the biggest challenge of the project was to finance the film since it was really hard to pitch in a way that people understood. The absurd tone and visual style was difficult to express in text. We had a very specific script but we also worked a lot with images and we had to do a couple of workshops with actors and dancers to develop and show what the language would look like. We spent years developing and financing before we actually got to the shooting phase.
On what’s next:
I’m currently editing a short film ”The Night Train” that is based on a memory, and a meeting I had with someone on a night train when I was 18. I’m also preparing a sci-fi short film called ”Successful Thawing of Mr. Moro” that we will shoot after this summer. It’s a film about a person that finds out that they will thaw and bring back his cryopreserved partner after 40 years of storage. I’m also developing two feature scripts, ”Bränder” and ”Shadows”, the latter is a feature set in the same world as ”Shadow Animals”. Together with my two colleagues Anette Sidor and Frida Mårtensson I’m also running an independent production company in Sweden called Verket Produktion.