00:04
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I chose Imaginary Scenery. Nocturne from 1981 by the painter Loui Michael.

00:10
Signe Byrge Sørensen
It's a bright, colourful picture with a yellow fence. It could be any fence in the town I grew up in. Growing out of this orange chaos on the ground, it's birds and weird characters and so on. This painting, it's full of generosity and love of the craziness of everything. It's like looking right into his very creative brain.

00:34
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I think painting as art is such a singular experience. It comes out of this one person's creative mind and then it's shared with all of us. And it's so different from film because film is such a collaborative art. Every little element in a film is discussed a million times and planned, shot, edited, redone, mixed, and so on.

00:57
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I don't think it's easy to paint at all. I think that must be incredibly hard. And in that sharing moment, we can take out of it whatever we feel at that particular time or any time. And I think that's really interesting.

01:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Signe Byrge Sørensen, a Danish producer. Welcome, Signe!

01:40
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Thank you very much.

01:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're very happy to have you here. We are talking to you from Vesterbrogade in Copenhagen, but we might as well have caught you on one of your many trips to Los Angeles. How often are you in Los Angeles, and what is your impression of the city from a producer's point of view?

02:00
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I haven't been back actually this last year. When I was last in the US, I went to New York for DOC NYC, and then I went to Telluride and Toronto this summer, but not Los Angeles, unfortunately.

02:13
Signe Byrge Sørensen
My aunt and uncle used to live in Arcadia and my cousin is still in Monrovia. So for many years, I was just coming to visit them. And my impression of the city is that it's a pretty amazing place. You really have to know each and every neighborhood to find all the wonderful spots. We used to walk a lot in the hills when we were there.

02:38
Signe Byrge Sørensen
There's a lot of things I love about the place. I think it's also been really hard hit with everything that's happened these last few months, with the drought and with the fires. And that's of course absolutely terrible.

02:50
Signe Byrge Sørensen
We've worked a lot with companies in the US. They're usually based both in New York and Los Angeles, most recently NEON, and before that also Participant. Originally it was Drafthouse, they distributed The Act of Killing, and then together with Participant, they distributed The Look of Silence.

03:10
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Later on we had a collaboration with NEON around Flee, that was our animated documentary. And now with The End, we've worked with NEON again. And all those collaborations have been really, really important for the films and also been very, very warm and wonderful collaborations.

03:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I will return to talking about NEON and Participant that unfortunately closed down recently, so a loss for the industry. I wanted to ask you, since you said you have family here, has it ever crossed your mind to maybe make the move to this country?

03:45
Signe Byrge Sørensen
We are so fortunate in Denmark to have public support for our film industry, because of its cultural value, and we have support from what's called the Danish Film Institute. And most of the films that I've been involved with have been artistic productions that have been supported by the Danish Film Institute and also often by film institutes like that in other European countries.

04:10
Signe Byrge Sørensen
For example, The End was a six-country co-production made in Europe, but also with the participation of NEON. I think that kind of amazing environment that's both artistic and practical, and the general support of filmmaking in the way that we work here, I wouldn't change it for anything else.

04:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're talking to you at a time when you've accomplished something new. We know you as a very successful producer of a long list of documentaries, but recently you released your first fiction feature called The End. It's a kind of genre-bending film, a musical that deals with the end of the world after a natural catastrophe. And Joshua Oppenheimer directed it.

04:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I want to ask you about how producing a feature film is a different process from doing a documentary. How was the experience for you? And looking back, what did you have to learn in order to be able to do this?

05:09
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I've had to learn an amazing amount of stuff, because fiction film, from the producer's point of view, is a very different venture. When we do documentaries, we are often a director, a producer, an editor, and a cinematographer, and it's a tiny little crew. And we work in close collaboration all along.

05:31
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And the thing that changes is the situation around the participants, the main characters of the film, and we try to accommodate that as much as possible, and we try to design the whole production process around their lives to make it work in a way that's least disturbing, but at the same time catching what was happening for them in their lives that this film is trying to cover.

05:55
Signe Byrge Sørensen
With fiction, it's much more like an army operation. There's a huge crew involved. In this case, sometimes it was anything between 60 and 100 people at any one day during the shoot. And also in the whole development or the whole process of preparation for the shoot, it's a different situation because we were working with actors from the US and the UK, and they have agents and lawyers and publicists and that whole sort of group of people. I had to learn how to work with that.

06:31
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And also, finance-wise, we were working with a completely different set of budgets and so I had to prepare myself for this. I'd done that by being the minor co-producer of three fiction films before. Two of them were by the Swedish director Tarik Saleh and where they were shot in Arabic even though they were Swedish majority productions.

06:54
Signe Byrge Sørensen
 One was called The Nile Hilton Incident and won dramatic competition at Sundance, and the other one was called Boy From Heaven and it premiered in Cannes. We did one Irish-Belgian co-production earlier than that as well.

07:06
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then I attended some courses. I did something called ACE, which is a producer's course in Europe. And then I also did another course in the UK called Inside Pictures, which is basically created to introduce European and UK producers to working in a US setting. So to try and understand the similarities and the differences between working in the film industry in Europe and America.

07:33
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then I had a lot of help from a lot of fantastic Danish producers who are more experienced than me, people from Nimbus Film, from Centropa, from all around. They were very, very supportive, all of them.

07:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How involved were you in the location scouting and the script development, which is, I assume, one of the very big differences between a documentary and a feature, that you have a script that you actually follow. With documentaries, anything can happen during a shoot. And were you on set all the time when the film was being shot?

08:10
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I was involved in the script process as a first reader and consultant throughout the process. So Joshua and Rasmus would meet and they would write on a daily basis. They wrote the first draft of the script and then later Joshua worked with Joshua Schmidt, our composer, to write the lyrics. And then there was a whole process of combining the two, the scripts and the songs, and so on. And throughout that process, I would read and give feedback at regular intervals.

08:40
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then we did a lot of location scouting. That was very much Joshua and me in the beginning. And then later on also with Misha, the cinematographer. And once we had found the salt mine, which is the key location for us, then we would also bring the other heads of departments so that they could figure out how it would work for their departments in this space. I think Joshua and I visited five different salt mines and then he visited two other ones. So I saw a lot of salt mines.

09:07
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then on the shoot, I was part of the whole shoot in Ireland. We shot in the studio and we had four weeks of rehearsals first. And after that we had four weeks of shooting, with one week in between. We were all working in the same building, but in the beginning I was very much in my office because we were closing the finances of everything while they were still doing the rehearsals.

09:29
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then in Italy, I was at the set all the time because it's a working salt mine, so they were also actually producing salt in a factory inside of the salt mine while we were shooting. There was only one telephone from the salt mine out to the production office outside. So it didn't make sense to be in another space. Basically, I had to be in there all the time. And by then we were also so far with all the paperwork and so on. So it was possible for me to be on set every day with Joshua and be present there.

10:02
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then in Germany, we shot in the studio where again, we had the office right next door. And then we also shot some parts on location in a German salt mine where the lake is, and in some locations where we built sets around certain things and so on. It was a very, very intimate experience in that sense, even though it involved a huge amount of people.

10:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
To the listener who has not seen The End, it might sound weird that we are talking about a salt mine. So maybe we should explain why you shot in a salt mine. All of the movie takes place underground.

10:39
Signe Byrge Sørensen
It's a story about a family, the last family alive after the world has gone under, in some unspecified climate related disaster. So we never come outside. They have made a home down there. It's a very, very beautiful, elaborate luxury home because they've been very rich to be able to stay out of the danger zone for so long. They've been down there for 25 years. But in the film, the salt mine that they live in actually functions as the exterior of all the story.

11:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And we learn that the family is guilty of what has happened.

11:18
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Yeah, like all of us, in a sense, they are, we're all implicated in whatever is happening with the environment at the moment and with the climate. And so are they.

11:28
Signe Byrge Sørensen
The starting point for the project was the collaboration with Joshua. We've done The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence together and I wanted to work with him again, and he wanted to tell this story as a fiction film musical. Actually, originally the whole project grew out of our collaboration on the two Indonesian films, and he wanted to do another story about oligarchy in Indonesia, but it was too dangerous, and then we tried to find another setting where we could work. But it became too complex.

12:00
Signe Byrge Sørensen
The background story is that The Act of Killing came out in 2012, and The Look of Silence, we actually shot before The Act of Killing came out and edited and finished and then released in 2014. So once those two films were out in the world, it became too complex and dangerous to do this kind of work again in documentary. And we realized that after having tried for about a year after finishing the two films and finishing the whole round of distribution and stuff.

12:31
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then suddenly Joshua came one day, talked about all the same themes that he had been talking about for a while, but said, let's do them as a musical and as fiction. And in one sense that was a relief because that's less dangerous than trying to take on real-life oligarchs, but in other ways, of course, it's a challenge of a completely different dimension.

12:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And now that you have this quite unusual and extraordinary musical in your curriculum vitae, will you make more films like that?

13:05
Signe Byrge Sørensen
The ambition is to do films where the form and the content completely and utterly inform each other. And I think that's the case with this film. And I think I want to continue to explore that as a challenge, but I don't know at this point what the next films will be, that's for sure.

13:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back to the beginning. You grew up in Maribo on the island of Lolland in the southern part of Denmark. What was your childhood home like? Was it a creative home? Were your parents creative people?

13:40
Signe Byrge Sørensen
My mother is a nurse, my father is a public administrator, but they loved the arts, and they would take us to exhibitions and stuff like that. They put all their savings into modern Danish art, especially paintings. We had a lot of paintings by Loui Michael.

13:58
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Maribo is a small place, but it had a beautiful music school. It also had a very good high school where music and theater and arts were very highly regarded. And I was lucky enough to be able to take part in an experiment that was called the Data Media High School project, which basically meant that you could have media studies as your main subject for three years.

14:24
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And so I went through high school doing all these little projects, like we actually do films now, but just on a much smaller scale. So like a whole week, every other subject was suspended and we just did a radio play or a newspaper or a slideshow or a video or stuff like that.

14:41
Signe Byrge Sørensen
So I think that probably informed some of the ideas that I had about what I would like to do in the future. But at that time I never knew anyone who had made a film. I had no idea how you would get into that sort of environment.

14:56
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I studied politics and economics at Roskilde University, and then while I was there, focused on politics and economics of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and communication studies. I started to get to know some film people and started working on documentaries about these subjects. And that was my way in.

15:14
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Then I worked in a small production company called Spor Media, where they focused on those kinds of documentaries. And while I was there, I met the editor Janus Billeskov Jansen, and he was doing a huge project, a very ambitious project about the linguistic diversity of the world.

15:32
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And I got hired to do a little pilot for him of how you could basically go into the internet and explore the world's languages in various ways, but this was at a time where the internet was not so developed, so it became clear to us that it was too expensive to produce this.

15:52
Signe Byrge Sørensen
But then two documentaries that we did together, one called Voices of the World and the other one called The Importance of Being Mlabri. And those two films, plus another one that I did with Janus called Letters from Denmark inspired by the caricature crisis, became my second film school after the time in Spor.

16:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I wanted to stay a little bit in your childhood, because I know that you went to Saudi Arabia, and I was wondering what was that like for a young girl, and how did that create a spark of adventure for the outside world?

16:30
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I was 14 and this was 1984. My mother got a job as a chief nurse of dialysis in this program run by the Danish state. They basically exported nurses to this hospital in the southern part of Saudi Arabia, just north of the border to Yemen. And she was there for a year, my sister was there for half a year, I was only there for five weeks. It really sparked my curiosity and I thought it was such an amazing place to be and to experience. It was eye-opening and very, very interesting.

17:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you think that made you travel more later? Because I know you lived in other countries.

17:14
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I think so. I had family from my mother's side who lived in the US and from my father's side who lived in India and Thailand and so on. So I was already curious. And then after high school, the first place I moved to was Zimbabwe and I planted trees for three months and worked there with the local Red Cross and so on.

17:34
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I was totally bitten by the bug and wanted to go out and see the world and I tried to find ways of doing so by actually working with people locally. So I would experience it together with people who actually lived there. So that was very much a starting point for me also.

17:52
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then the wonderful thing about studying what was called international development studies at the time was that you could go out and do field work. So I went to Cameroon and studied the different ways that Cameroon has been colonized by Germany and France and England.

18:07
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I did an internship in Rajasthan on a project focused on bringing education to kids between six years and 14 years of age, both boys and girls in the rural areas of Rajasthan. My job became to figure out all the best ways that they had done communication with kids and parents and gotten things to work. So that was also an amazing chance.

18:35
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then I finally did my master's thesis on the struggle over the development of the South African media post-apartheid. I went to South Africa and I worked with local people who were trying to democratize the media after the fall of apartheid. It was very, very exciting, all of it.

18:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes. I believe that you team-work a lot when you study at the University of Roskilde. During my studies I worked mainly independently and I wish I'd had more collaborative work. Do you think the Roskilde model is a good one?

19:16
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I think it probably depends on who you are and what kind of work you do, but for this kind of work that I'm doing as a producer, trying to bring people together and from everyone having different expertise and contributing to creating the same one artifact that's the film, I think it's a really good model, and you learn a lot that you can use in real life straight away. Because film is so much a collaborative art form.

19:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned before that you studied at Ace to educate yourself and make fiction. You also attended the European co-production courses EURODOC in 2003 and EAVE in 2010. How important is it for you to continue to educate yourself and be in the student chair, so to speak?

20:06
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I think it's really important because the film industry changes all the time. And this is both technologically and politically. And also financially— where is the money, what funds are available, that kind of thing. The way we work, because Denmark is a small place, even though we have public funding for films, we never get the full budget out of the Danish Film Institute.

20:28
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Maybe we can raise 20–30% of the full part of the finance of a film, both fiction and documentary, out of Denmark. And then we have to bring in the Nordic countries and then we have to bring in Europe, and sometimes it's possible also to bring in the US. For the kind of films we do that are artistic and international in content, that means that you often have somewhere between ten to 25 different sources of funding, and maybe even more, involved in your project.

21:00
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And so you are totally dependent on having a network of good and safe co-producers to work with in different countries. And because we do documentaries and often our stories are cross-border stories, we have to also go where the story goes. We have to often find new co-producers in new countries because it's a country that's suddenly relevant for a film that we are making.

21:26
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And that kind of collaboration across borders is extremely interesting but of course also very challenging because of different languages and different systems and different legal rules and all these kinds of things.

21:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are one of the founders of a Danish production company called Final Cut for Real. How did that come together?

21:49
Signe Byrge Sørensen
When I worked with Janus Billeskov Jansen, it happened in a company called Final Cut Productions, where I was a young producer, that did both documentary and fiction. They did Jan Troell's film Everlasting Moments, and they did The Art of Crying as fiction, and they did several documentaries as well, including ours. But they stopped at the end of 2008.

22:12
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Thomas, the head of the company, became the head of the Norwegian Film School and the others decided to do other things. And I had met Joshua Oppenheimer, the director of The End and The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. I'd met him a year before and we had started working on what became The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

22:32
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And I was not ready to stop that at all. And I also knew that because I'd just been employed in this company, if this project went to another production company, then maybe I wouldn't be part of it. And so somehow the only solution seemed to be that we made a company. And I had never, ever dreamt of making a company. I had no idea how to do that.

22:55
Signe Byrge Sørensen
We started Final Cut for Real in June 2009. And the first two years I was really scared. Because I kept thinking someone would walk in the door and tell me that we had forgotten to do certain things or whatever.

23:09
Signe Byrge Sørensen
But we tried to do everything the way that Final Cut Productions had done it before and I got, luckily, Anne Köhncke, who was the other founding producer together with me. She had been working at Final Cut Productions and wanted to do documentaries and had specialized in documentaries in her studies as well.

23:29
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Anne had gotten a job as a sales agent when TV 2 was still selling documentaries. Once all of this happened, I went to her and said, you said you wanted to do documentaries, and would you like to make a company with me? So Anne and I were the ones who started, the regular producers there, and then Janus Billeskov Jansen, the editor that I'd worked with, and Joshua, they both came in as founders as well.

23:53
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And that was in 2009. And then it slowly developed. We got Monica Hellstrôm involved because she and I did this course together in 2010. So we got to know her and she became part of the company. And then Heidi Elise Christensen joined a few years later and Maria Kristensen, who is still here, also joined. And now we just recently have two younger producers, Esther Nissen and Alberte Lyngbo. It's a long story now, but in the beginning, it was scary.

24:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned meeting Joshua Oppenheimer, and you met him in 2007. Describe to us the first time you and him met, and whether you knew that this was going to be a special person in your life already at that point.

24:43
Signe Byrge Sørensen
It actually happened in a way where first I met a friend of ours called Michael Uwemedimo because Joshua at the time was living in London and he was part of this little collective called Vision Machine. And they were four directors / producers and they had two projects, one in the US and one in Indonesia.

25:04
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And Michael came over to a seminar organized by CPH:DOX and did a presentation of both projects. And he showed a piece that we called "The River Walk" that later became part of The Look of Silence. And that's one of those places where the perpetrators in Indonesia, they walk down to the river and they show how they used to kill people at this riverside. And they're very open about what happened and what they did and how they did it.

25:03
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And on the sound, you can hear this voice asking them questions in a very polite way and also in a very open-minded way, but also in a very smart way, that brings out what this is really all about. And that was Joshua. I didn't know that at the time, but I got very interested and I found out that Joshua was the main person in that group together with Christine Cynn who were working on the Indonesia project.

25:59
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And he was in Indonesia at the time, shooting some of the stuff that went into both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence later. And so I wrote to him and I asked, do you need a producer? Because I heard about your project and I think it's extremely interesting. And do you have anything in writing I can read or do you have anything you can show me? I didn't know at the time that he already had a whole mountain of tapes and absolutely no money.

26:26
Signe Byrge Sørensen
He sent me his PhD. He had been funding himself and the project with academic funding, because it had been really hard to get any kind of TV involvement or any kind of film support in the UK where he was based at the time. And so I read it and I thought it was extremely interesting because it was a practice-based PhD. It was all about what he had been shooting and why and how and so on.

26:50
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And so I wrote him back and said, now I've read it and can we meet? When he came back that winter from Indonesia, he and Christine came to Copenhagen and they brought some of the tapes from what they had already shot. He came up to our editing room at Final Cut in our old place in the harbour. And he showed it to me and to Janus Billeskov Jansen, the editor that I mentioned before. And it just blew our minds.

27:15
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Every time he put in another tape, there was one more layer to the story. It became deeper and deeper and wilder and wilder. I had known it already when I saw "The River Walk" that there was something very special about it, but it definitely became even stronger for me, that feeling, when I met him and when I saw this material.

27:33
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then we discussed, over the next year, how to approach all this, and how to make it into those two films, one with the perpetrators and one with the victims, and each one in their own form that was informed by the way the victims were thinking about the whole situation and the way that the perpetrators were seeing themselves and so on.

27:56
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And so it was a continuous development from the moment we met, both in terms of the film and in terms of the relationship. And then it also took a long time to actually produce the two films. We met in January 2008, and The Act of Killing was finished in 2012, and The Look of Silence was finished in 2014.

28:16
Signe Byrge Sørensen
In parallel with those two films, during those years, Anna and I, and then also Monica and Heidi and the other people who got involved, produced other films on the side, both because we had to also have other projects and because we wanted to. We all had directors that we wanted to work with and we had ideas for other projects and so on.

23:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And to those of our listeners who don't know, there was a genocide in Indonesia in the 1960s and we're talking about those perpetrators who killed a lot of civilians in Indonesia at the time. Quite horrific.

28:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have been to the Oscars several times now, with The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. And you also went with a documentary called Flee, which was about a refugee from Afghanistan who went to Denmark. I can imagine that it's overwhelming the first time you go to the Oscars. What is your impression of the award show and its significance as a business tool for you, because you don't go for the glam, I can imagine.

29:22
Signe Byrge Sørensen
No, I think what we learned is that it's a very, very strong launching pad for any kind of film, and especially documentaries and arthouse films that don't have the kind of big advertising budgets that the big fiction films have. So for us it was really important in terms of getting the story out about what happened in Indonesia.

29:48
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And we used it to try to also release all the documents that were in the US about the atrocities in Indonesia, how the US had been involved. And that became a four-year campaign. And in the end, a lot of documents were actually released. For us, the Oscar campaign was a huge opportunity for that kind of work.

30:09
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And I think a lot of documentaries use the Oscar setup in that way. It's also clear that of course, you have a much bigger chance or a much bigger footprint also, if you have a bigger distributor, a US distributor for your film. We had Drafthouse the first time, and then the second time we had Drafthouse and Participant, and that made what we could do even bigger and with more impact and so on.

30:36
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then with Flee, we had NEON and with A House Made of Splinters, we didn't have anyone. That was a film from Ukraine, produced by Monica Hellstrôm and directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont. So we've tried all of it. Yeah, it's a tough game, when you have to do it without a US distributor.

30:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And that was a film about a children's home in Ukraine, right?

31:02
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Yeah, in the eastern part of Ukraine.

31:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What have you learned that are the differences between an American company like NEON and the way that you do business in Denmark or Europe in general?

31:16
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I've learned how a lot of US companies actually, in a sense, also co-produce. They bring different partners together for a project, even though they're all in the same country. Whereas often we have a German co-producer, and then we have a Danish co-producer, and a Norwegian co-producer, and we find money in each of our countries.

31:36
Signe Byrge Sørensen
But often in the US, it's the same but different. They also collaborate, but they collaborate because they have different distribution outlets, or because they are different partners that all bring something to the table. I didn't see that originally before I started working with Drafthouse and Participant and NEON, but I noticed that now in a different way.

31:58
Signe Byrge Sørensen
All the partners we've had in the US are extremely professional and extremely good at what they're doing. Also, when you come from a small country and you work with partners in such a huge country, there's of course cultural differences always, and we had to learn to work with so many people, CC on everything, and figure out the different departments and the different responsibilities and all of that. But I think we've started to learn how to do that.

32:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You worked with NEON on Flee and now also The End and NEON is the company behind, for instance, the Oscar winner Parasite and this year, they're behind Anora, which might very well win the Oscar. So they are doing very well. What makes this company, NEON, a good partner for you?

32:49
Signe Byrge Sørensen
It's their curiosity and the fact that in such a tough environment as the American environment, they dare to try artistic projects like ours. I think that's incredible and I think they are absolutely amazing in that respect.

33:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You collaborated with Jonas Poher Rasmussen on the documentary Flee. It was nominated in three categories at the Oscars: Animation, Best International Feature, and Best Documentary in 2022. What were the challenges of making this as an animated film from a producer's point of view?

33:29
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I should say first and foremost that the main producer was Monica Hellstrôm and the main animation producer was Charlotte de La Gournerie from France and Denmark. And Monica and I learned a huge amount about animation from Charlotte and we could never have done this without her and Sun Creature, the French company, and Vivement Lundi!, the other French company, that were involved, because they had all the expertise in how to do animation.

33:57
Signe Byrge Sørensen
But we brought together the creation of this story from the starting point of documentary and also with the editing of Janus Billeskov Jansen. And then learned along the way, both us and Janus, how to make all the decisions that go into making an animation film. In the beginning it was quite scary because it was a big budget for us at the time. It was the biggest film we had made until then.

34:26
Signe Byrge Sørensen
At the same time, once we realized how the animation, the most expensive part of the project, how controlled that is, we started to relax. Because in a way, an animated film is almost the opposite of a documentary, because you edit the story first, and then you animate it.

34:45
Signe Byrge Sørensen
So by the time we had edited it as a storyboard, or what's called animatics, we knew the story was there, we knew the film was there, and from then on it was a matter of making it stronger and beautiful, and getting the backgrounds and the characters and everything right.

35:00
Signe Byrge Sørensen
But we knew that the actual story is there, where often in documentaries, you shoot and you collect a lot of materials and then you edit and then you have to find the story in the editing and then maybe you shoot a bit more and so on. The editing becomes, also, almost the writing process. And this was almost the other way around.

35:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The American trade magazine Variety has called you a world class producer. Now, I know that you are humble and not the least boastful, but how does one get to this level as a producer? What is the recipe to become a world class producer and international success at the level you're at?

35:44
Signe Byrge Sørensen
That's hard to answer. I don't know. I think it has to be a combination of finding projects and people — projects that you want to work on with people that you feel have something important to say that's aligned with what you want to say to the world, and then a huge amount of hard work that goes into it. And then, of course, an interest to work internationally and wanting to tell international stories. That's the starting point for all of that.

36:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Documentary features are very different from fiction features and I assume that you rely a lot on festivals to get the word out. How important are film festivals to the life of a documentary and which festivals are the best from your point of view in terms of what they can do for your particular films?

36:38
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I think the most important documentary festivals in Europe are CPH:DOX and IDFA. And I'm not mentioning CPH:DOX just because it's in Denmark, but it is actually a very, very prominent festival by now. And in the US, the most important is Sundance, and that's also extra important because of the time of year. It's in January and the new season starts with Sundance.

37:06
Signe Byrge Sørensen
So if you can have your film in Sundance and sell it out of there, that's the best launching pad for any documentary film that you can have. And if you can combine it with Berlin and Europe, then that's even better.

37:19
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Alternatively, another starting point that's really, really good is the combination of Telluride, Toronto, Venice, in any combination. And these festivals, they are A festivals, but they're also strong in choosing documentaries. Cannes is also an extremely important festival, but they are less interested, I think, in documentaries, and it's harder to see what their focus is when it comes to choosing documentaries.

37:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sundance takes place in Park City in Utah. Which of your films started their life at Sundance?

37:55
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Actually in the same year, we had President, which is a documentary by Camilla Nielsson, her second film from Zimbabwe. And it's about the election process that happened after Mugabe was ousted from power and it was supposedly the first democratic election after this happened, but it wasn't democratic at all and it shows in the film. And that film came out of Sundance.

38:20
Signe Byrge Sørensen
And then the same year we had Flee and we sold Flee out of Sundance to NEON. And then before that, one year, we had a minor co-production called Strong Island that we co-produced that was sold to Netflix out of there. And that year The Nile Hilton Incident, which is also called Cairo Confidential, won the dramatic competition. So we've had some really good experiences at Sundance.

38:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I could talk to you forever, but now my final question is, how many projects are on your desk right now, and do you have a dream project that you still wait to get fulfilled?

39:02
Signe Byrge Sørensen
No, right now I just dream of sleeping more. I think I have too many projects on my desk and I should learn to say no more often. But it's hard to know which projects will actually work out. And also there are a lot of very talented directors around that we — not just me, but my colleagues — all of us together, would like to produce their films.

39:28
Signe Byrge Sørensen
I do have some secret projects of my own that I also want to push at some point, when they're ready, but nothing where I feel that it should be right now.

39:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Well, Signe, thank you very much for your time with Danish Originals. I hope you get to sleep very well tonight.

39:44
Signe Byrge Sørensen
Thank you. Thanks a lot.

39:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It was a pleasure having you on Danish Originals.

39:49
Signe Byrge Sørensen
No, thank you very much.

39:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Signe Byrge Sørensen chose Loui Michael's Imaginær sceneri. Nocturne, or Imaginary Scene. Nocturne from 1981 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.