00:02
Sigrid Dyekjær
I chose Kirsten Justesen and I chose this amazing   not a painting, it's a photo — of this woman. And I think it is Kirsten herself. I love that she put fish in front of her. It's a provocative photo. It's very feminine and it hides some of the normal things you would think would be the most provocative things.

00:24
Sigrid Dyekjær
And it turns it upside down by having these beautiful fish. I love it. It really is enormously beautiful. It spoke to me because I love the female body. It's just such a beautiful sculpture, and you can't watch it enough.

00:41
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 National Gallery of Denmark and the American Friends of The National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

00:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today our guest is Sigrid Dyekjær, a very accomplished Danish producer. Welcome, Sigrid.

01:03
Sigrid Dyekjær
Thank you.

01:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are in Los Angeles. You're about to screen one of the films that you executive produced here in Hollywood. The film is called Apolonia, Apolonia and it's directed by Lea Glob. It is not the first time that you screen a film here. What is your relationship to Los Angeles?

01:22
Sigrid Dyekjær
I love Los Angeles. I love the climate. I love the people. I come here as often as I can. I prioritize it as much as I can. My family is in love with Los Angeles. So it's not very hard to convince them to come and join me. So I would just say I have only pure love connected to Los Angeles.

01:46
Sigrid Dyekjær
I also like New York and I also like some other places in the US. But I just connect so strongly with LA just because of the people here and they are relaxed and you feel very free here. And you have an amazing climate. When you are a Dane, this is an amazing climate.

02:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What makes you feel free here?

02:06
Sigrid Dyekjær
I think it's something about the distances. They're quite long. And every time you sit in a car, you need to relax because you know it's going to take you an hour to get anywhere. So it's better just to relax. I knit a lot. So I'm actually knitting a lot in the car. Not when I'm driving it, but if I'm next to the driver.

02:25
Sigrid Dyekjær
Yeah, I get a lot of sweaters done on my car rides here in Los Angeles. I know that's pretty unique and pretty special. I really enjoy, also, the very bright sky. You have a lot of sky and you have a lot of lights. The lights are always very bright. Your ocean and your beaches, very wide and very open.

02:47
Sigrid Dyekjær
So it just gives you a feel of freedom and something more relaxed. I think also each time you get into a car and you drive maybe two hours or three hours, you're in the most amazing nature spots. Like Topanga, I love Topanga. And Ojai, I love so many beautiful nature reserves places right outside of LA.

03:09
Sigrid Dyekjær
My family's favorite place is Palm Springs. We love Palm Springs. Yeah. So if you love nature, you are actually very close to it when you are in LA, whereas you feel it's longer away or further away when you're in New York. So yeah, there's a big difference.

03:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that creatively invigorating?

03:27
Sigrid Dyekjær
I think it's because I'm a Dane and we love nature. I went to kindergarten where we were in a forest every day. We actually didn't have a house. We just went and walked for three, four hours every day, no matter the weather. And I'm half Icelandic. So I feel very connected to the earth and the planet and nature. I do feel I'm closer to nature here.

03:49
Sigrid Dyekjær
There's always a lot of beautiful parks in Los angeles. It's not very difficult to get to huge parks, enormously big parks compared to the parks we have at home in Copenhagen. So yeah, I think here's a little bit of everything in Los angeles. And I love that.

04:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are here as a professional person. You are a producer and you created your own company. It's called Real Lava and it's got the subtitle "films that glow." You created that in 2021, I believe you have some partners, and you have produced quite a few successful documentary films that screened at prominent festivals. And you've made movies like Merkel, Innocence, and The Territory. What made you want to start this company? What did you want to achieve?

04:37
Sigrid Dyekjær
I was in a company called Danish Documentary for 14 years and that is actually the company that produced Apolonia, Apolonia. I enjoyed that time and it was a great moment. I was with a lot of really great directors and we formed this female collective and did films, where female directors could actually make films and actually have a professional life doing films. And it was a fantastic period.

05:04
Sigrid Dyekjær
But of course, as years went by, I got more and more options and more and more possibilities to do films in other places than just in Denmark. So I decided to, I would say, go for some of the options or go for some of the possibilities of working with directors all over the world.

05:23
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that wasn't really possible in that collaboration, because they were Danish and they were not that interested in making films all over the world. They were especially not that interested in us growing to be a bigger company. And so I decided one day after COVID, after being at home and missing my collaborators from around the world, that now was time to do something different.

05:48
Sigrid Dyekjær
And it's been interesting to talk with people about COVID and what that period did to them. I think a lot of people looked at their lives and made some new choices for their lives. And for me, it was a new beginning. And the French partners called me and said, do you want to do a company that's only you and us together? And you can pick wherever you want to have a base.

06:10
Sigrid Dyekjær
Like, you don't have to have a base in Copenhagen. It doesn't have to be a Danish company. You can decide. But I do love Denmark and I love Copenhagen and I have my kids and my family there. And Copenhagen is such a beautiful place to live. It's very easy to get anywhere, it's very easy to get direct flights to LA, for instance, and New York, and somewhere else.

06:31
Sigrid Dyekjær
I am Danish and I love to have my daily life there, and then from there I can always go out and work a couple of months in other places. I am not tied to Denmark in that sense, but I am working out of Denmark.

06:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've been a producer for many years. What does it mean to you to be a producer? Explain to people who don't quite know what it means. Are you part of the creative process? Some producers aren't, some are.

06:58
Sigrid Dyekjær
I like that question. I think it's a great question. What is a producer? And I keep asking myself that every day. What is my job? It's because the job of a producer is, at least when you do documentaries, I don't know if it's the same when you do narrative films.

07:13
Sigrid Dyekjær
But when you do documentaries and there is basically not that good funding while you're making the films, you tend to do a lot of things, like buying the groceries and doing the catering and making sure that the insurances function. And that there's contracts with the people we work with and finance to the film and the right partners on board.

07:32
Sigrid Dyekjær
So it's just a very weird job. I would say it's maybe the most weird job in the business and maybe also one of the most difficult jobs. Because it's very hard to please everybody and very often, one director likes how you are and your method, et cetera, others don't. And it's really about trying to create teams and trying to create an environment where a director can work and make a film.

08:02
Sigrid Dyekjær
And to find those collaborators that help that director in the best possible way. Each director is different and each film is different. So in a way you do a new startup constantly, and that can be tiring for some, but for me, it's perfect because I'm a very restless person.

08:22
Sigrid Dyekjær
I'm impatient. And I also get bored quite easily. And so my mom was always very worried for me because she was like, you have so many talents, but you get bored so easily. You don't stick with things. You don't do it to the bitter end, etc. And I think she was right. I was worried, like, what type of job could I do?

08:41
Sigrid Dyekjær
But what I found in documentary filmmaking is, you need to have talent in so many different directions and be a good connector and have a good network and blah, blah, blah, that you can't call the job boring. That's not a word that fits with documentary producing. You can call it tiring, for sure. And you can call it tedious sometimes, for sure.

09:04
Sigrid Dyekjær
And you can call it strenuous, definitely. Like Apolonia, Apolonia, a film that took 13 years to shoot. How do you build finance into a film that takes 13 years to shoot? So you can call it a lot of negative words, but for me, it's exciting and it's exciting because not two days look the same and not two films look the same.

09:26
Sigrid Dyekjær
And the directors are very different and each time it's almost an anthropological study of who is this person and how do I make sure that person comes out with their specialty or their special talent or their strength as a director? How do I make sure that the film lands in a way where the audience feels how special this director is and that special view the director has upon its subject or theme or their film?

09:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
"Producer" is not a job title that when you're a kid, you go, Oh, that's my dream, I want to be a producer, I assume. What made you decide that this was going to be your job, that you wanted to become a producer?

10:08
Sigrid Dyekjær
I didn't think that I wanted to become a producer. It's not something I was saying like five years old and da da da. And actually the job of producing documentaries did not exist when I was young, at least not in Denmark, maybe here in America, I'm not quite sure.

10:22
Sigrid Dyekjær
A lot of filmmakers in America, I have a feeling, were director, producer, in one person. They were director, shooter, producer, editor, sound designer in one person. So I think the whole making that feel much more professional and also in a way making documentaries almost function the same way as narrative films has also created an opportunity for my generation to be the first generation to really have the job of a producer be a specific job, a professional job.

10:53
Sigrid Dyekjær
I didn't have anybody I looked at when I was growing up and thinking, Oh my God, I want to be like that person. There wasn't really any. And I was studying Dramaturgy. Basically, I think because my mom actually signed me up for Dramaturgy at the university because she was nervous and she was like, you got to do something, you got to study, because I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

11:14
Sigrid Dyekjær
I knew I wanted to do something with film. At some point, I thought I was going to be an actor. I worked while I was studying Dramaturgy. I worked in a theater in Århus in Denmark. And I saw all these actors, like really so tough for them. They didn't know how to take care of their kids and they had to rehearse during the day, show during the evening.

11:35
Sigrid Dyekjær
It seemed so tough and also so closed in a theater. They never saw the daylight, because they were inside that theater from morning till night. So when I tried working with the director, being a director's assistant, I was like, I'm not gonna do theater, that's not gonna work for me. I'm not gonna work as a director in theater or be an actor in theater.

11:58
Sigrid Dyekjær
I went to Copenhagen after studying for quite a lot of years. I worked during the winter time as a ski instructor, and I had this client that kept coming back and the client was a production manager in advertisements. And she said, you're studying Dramaturgy the rest of the year. And then during the winter, you are here as a ski instructor. You're not going to be a ski instructor for the rest of your life.

12:21
Sigrid Dyekjær
And I was like, Oh no, maybe you're right. I wasn't even thinking that long. And she said, when you get home, I'm going to hire you and you're going to be my assistant, production assistant, and you can maybe combine dramaturgy with fixing everything, because that's what you also do when you're skiing with clients that don't know how to ski.

12:38
Sigrid Dyekjær
I got home, started working for her and I think I had that job for two months and then the company said, you're really not a production assistant, you are actually a producer. Because somehow I could see much further, like the broader picture of where we wanted to aim with this advertisement. I was seeing how to put the teams together, how to meet what the client was saying, things that a production assistant wouldn't do.

13:04
Sigrid Dyekjær
So they were a little irritated at me because I was not really good at the production assistant job, but I was way better at the strategic job. I was like, okay, so maybe it's producer, I don't know, and started doing it in advertising. And then I did that for five years, made a ton of advertisements, and was very tired of doing these one to two minute stories.

13:25
Sigrid Dyekjær
With a little baby on my arm, I said to my boss, I'm quitting, and he was like, what are you going to do? I hadn't gone to the Danish Film School, so I was never educated as a producer. And so I was like, I don't know, I always wanted to do documentaries, ever since I got into the film format, I loved documentaries. I called up some of the editors I worked with during the advertisements and they said, come to our company.

13:49
Sigrid Dyekjær
It was called Tju Bang Film. Can you imagine that name? Incredible name. And so I went to Tju Bang Film and there were all these men and they were editing and also being narrative directors. And I was like, I really want to do documentaries. And they were editing documentaries.

14:05
Sigrid Dyekjær
And they said, if you want to learn how to produce documentaries, it's not really a job, just so you know, it doesn't really exist in documentaries. But if you want to do that, come to our editing room and you're going to sit four years in our editing room and then you're going to learn how to produce. I was also helping post-producing, et cetera.

14:24
Sigrid Dyekjær
I was in their editing room every day, seeing what they were editing, learning what it actually meant to put a film together, figuring out things like when they talk about music, is that literally the music? Or is that the rhythm of the film, the dynamics of the film? My whole film language, I learned through four years in an editing room, watching the editors do documentaries.

14:49
Sigrid Dyekjær
I got a mentorship, you could say, and a tough start in an editing room. But it's a good place to start if you want to do documentaries, because a lot of the documentaries, all the problems show in the editing room, but also you actually write the script in the editing room. And you also learn so much about building characters, building stories, making sure those stories grip the audience all the way through. And yeah, that was the basis of it.

15:14
Sigrid Dyekjær
I didn't learn how to get money. That was another task I had to learn. But coming from advertising, you do learn how to work with clients and you know how to budget and you know how to find the financial partners with these brands, etc. So that I felt I had with me and it wasn't a new deal how to negotiate and how to get the right amounts of money for your film.

15:38
Sigrid Dyekjær
But really the filmmaking process, back to the creative questions you had, like how much do you get involved creatively, I would say, some. I'm not very good at shootings, like I actually hate to be on shoots. It's not that I don't love our participants and our subjects, I love them. It's just a very slow process for me and I get really, you know, I just lose a lot of my energy. I much rather sit for hours and hours in an editing room that builds energy towards me much more easily.

16:12
Sigrid Dyekjær
And I think that's different from producer to producer. Some producers love to be at shoots, they love the energy of the camera and the equipment and crew members, et cetera. And some producers love the editing and the post production. And I think since the job is so crazy, and the job is really from everything, even to making the sandwiches and making sure people are not hungry, stuff like that.

16:36
Sigrid Dyekjær
Over the many years, I've learned that it's important to figure out what you're good at, where do you get your energy, what do you think is fun, and then really try and find your team around you so that they have other specialties that they're good at, that you are less good at.

16:54
Sigrid Dyekjær
I'm a terrible writer. I don't write very much, I don't really like writing. I can read and I know exactly, strategically, so what are we going to do in order to sell it and what should we emphasize? What should be first? And what is that called? An editor, writing editor. I'm great at that, but I'm not good at being the writer. And so I have in my team, a young producer who's really good at writing.

17:18
Sigrid Dyekjær
It is important to figure out what are you good at and what are you less good at, and build your team to compromise that, to make sure that you have those different parties in your team.

17:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have made a lot of very different documentaries —

17:33
Sigrid Dyekjær
Thank God!

17:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— theme-wise, yes. And I will talk to you about some of them, also the one that you're screening today here in LA. But let's start with the Oscar-nominated The Cave, because that's when I got to know you. It was directed by Feras Fayyad and it takes place in Syria. Talk about the experience of making this film.

17:55
Sigrid Dyekjær
Yeah, I produced this film together with Kirstine Barfod. How we divided that job was, she was very much a day to day producer. She was deeply involved in a lot of the issues on an everyday basis. I was involved in the full film from the beginning to the end, watching a ton of material going through how we could set it up, and what was the most secure way of setting everything up, to getting National Geographic on board, etc.

18:19
Sigrid Dyekjær
So the film is shot in a hospital underneath ground, in Syria. It's in the middle of the war and it's run by a woman, Dr. Amani, who's quite young, and she is the chief of the hospital, which is unique in Syria, because not a lot of women have positions where they're actually leaders in any field. But she was democratically voted to be the leader of this hospital.

18:44
Sigrid Dyekjær
Her job was interesting in the fact that she was really managing the hospital, making sure that they would get medicine in and also rebuilding the hospital underneath ground as the hospital was being bombed in different areas. She had to always be looking very far ahead, to dig out new rooms for the hospital, dig out new tunnels for the hospital. So the hospital was a constantly moving thing underneath the ground.

19:10
Sigrid Dyekjær
It was for me very inspirational because she is a female leader in a country that is very patriarchal. And Dr. Amani found a way with children in the hospital, especially young girls, she would always empower them. She would always give them hope that there's going to be a life for you as a woman in this country and you're going to rebuild your country.

19:31
Sigrid Dyekjær
I was every day so impressed by Dr. Amani that every day you worked a little more and you did a little more and you just thought a little more because you knew you had such a big responsibility making this film.

19:41
Sigrid Dyekjær
Of course, it's not my country, Syria, and it's not Kirstine Barfod, the other producer, it's not her country. We really tried to create a setup where Feras Fayyad, who is Syrian, living in exile in Denmark, that it was his story and it was his country and it was his people and we didn't try to impinge ourselves as Danes, oh, we're really having some good ideas of how to do this and that.

20:08
Sigrid Dyekjær
We really tried to create an atmosphere where he could come out with who he was and all his people, Syrian people, could shine and we would more be stepping in the background.

20:20
Sigrid Dyekjær
So I think for a lot of the films that I've been producing, it's enormously important to always look at the origin. I think documentary filmmaking has not had such a good reputation. It was anthropologists that would go and they would really use the people that they were filming.

20:36
Sigrid Dyekjær
It was not always as ethical as you would want it to be. So I think for my generation, we've really tried to work on making this field more ethical and do better collaborations with our subjects and with our participants.

20:52
Sigrid Dyekjær
I would say, with Merkel, it was hard, because Angela Merkel didn't want to be part of our film. She blessed it and she said it's fine, but I don't think I'm such an important person. So I don't think you should make a film about me because I'm not that important. So that film is really built from archives.

21:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The Cave was nominated for an Oscar in 2020—

21:11
Sigrid Dyekjær
And we won an Emmy.

21:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you won an Emmy. I believe that this was the first time you were nominated for an Oscar. What was that whole experience like, from the campaign to the actual event? Try to describe what it feels like to be part of the Academy Awards.

21:25
Sigrid Dyekjær
Oh my god. How many hours do we have? Cause that's a big journey. I often ask myself, why should you do these campaigns? Why should you go out and try and run for an Oscar? What is the whole thing about? We never thought in Denmark that, Oh, the Oscars is going to be something for us.

21:41
Sigrid Dyekjær
I think what is so beautiful about an Academy campaign and what is really nice about having your film out on festivals and doing all these screenings is we have very little opportunity to actually put our films in the cinema. We have very few opportunities of running real theatrical runs like you would do on Barbie, on Oppenheimer. We don't really have that opportunity and possibility.

22:02
Sigrid Dyekjær
We don't do films to get rich and we don't do these films just because it's nice to make movies. We do these films because we actually want to do change in the world and we do believe that meeting an audience is helping in getting the message out and also giving us a little bit of strength in making these documentaries for no money. It gives us a little strength to actually continue to do it because we meet the audience.

22:29
Sigrid Dyekjær
We feel how excited they are. We feel how emotionally we can touch them. I think if you put a documentary film in a narrative competition, it's going to be hard for that narrative film to win. Because if it's a good documentary, it's going to touch your heart more and you're going to say to yourself, as the audience, Oh my God, this is real.

22:48
Sigrid Dyekjær
I'm watching something that is real and that feeling is just so special. The campaigns allow you to go out and meet the audience. Of course, it's tougher to run a campaign like on Apolonia, Apolonia, because we basically have no money to do it. So we're relying on friends and family — could you host a screening?

23:10
Sigrid Dyekjær
Sometimes you have money for these campaigns, sometimes you don't. But I keep telling the director that we're not doing it because of the money, we're actually doing it because we get the opportunity to do it. Apolonia, Apolonia is nominated for several awards and it actually gives us the traction that we can get some people to come and watch it.

23:30
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that special feeling of showing your work after 13 years to an audience and people are moved by it and touched by it, that's amazing. And I think we are creating a change if we keep insisting on going out and meeting our audience. We learn a lot about what works in the film. We also learn from, like, the next film we want to do. Oh, maybe it would be interesting to do a film about this, or find a character that can do these things. You learn from meeting your audience, a lot of things.

24:05
Sigrid Dyekjær
So The Cave was my first experience of a big campaign. And I would say I was pretty much like a hen without a head. Kirstine and I were running around trying to do all sorts of stuff. I'm lucky because I'm social and I like meeting people and I like talking with people and asking them questions, et cetera, and I don't mind receptions. I think it's fun to meet people. If you're an introvert, and you're not so social, oh my God, it's tough.

24:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We're in the middle of Hollywood right now where the Oscars take place, where it's actually almost, yeah, it's maybe a kilometer, a mile away from where we are right now. Can you talk about that experience? And most people can just dream of being part of that event. What was that night like for you?

24:46
Sigrid Dyekjær
I would say, what was those two weeks like up to the Oscars. When we got nominated, I knew how tough it was. A little of you feel guilty, that you were the one that got nominated, and you think of colleagues that did not get nominated, so it's with different emotions.

25:01
Sigrid Dyekjær
I would say the one thing I was super excited about was for Dr. Amani to be able to come and the nomination made us be able to get her to America. And for her to really meet the industry, meet people that had watched her film and loved her film. For me, that was just such a powerful moment and beautiful moment. And I was so enormously excited about that.

25:27
Sigrid Dyekjær
But also being in this city, the two weeks up to the Oscars, this city goes bananas. It's just insane. It's really amazing that a whole city embraces a one night event where somebody is going to get some weird male, gold, cold statue. I brought my children, I brought my husband. All of us were like, Oh my God, what's going on in this city? I think that is beautiful and I think that's fun and I think it's something that Los Angeles should be proud of.

25:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The Territory was close to getting nominated too. It was on the short list. It's not always easy finding a platform for documentary films like The Territory, but it got picked up at Sundance. National Geographic picked it up.

26:14
Sigrid Dyekjær
The Territory was set up with the indigenous community and together with our Brazilian local producer. This participatory filmmaking where you're making the film together, whether you are in front of the camera or behind the camera.

26:28
Sigrid Dyekjær
That's the type of productions I like to get involved in, where I feel like I can contribute a lot. They're done in such an ethical way that is how I see my producing flourishing in the best way. I like to dig in and get into it and get deep into it when I see the production is on its way to being structured in a good, healthy way. And nobody is exploiting anybody.

26:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does one find an audience for documentary films?

27:00
Sigrid Dyekjær
That's a tough question. Especially now, a lot of consolidation has been happening. A lot of streamers have been buying each other for millions of dollars. And it actually means they have less money now to pay for content. It's an unhealthy industry right now. It's an industry that's completely broken.

27:19
Sigrid Dyekjær
It's not only the documentaries that are suffering. It's definitely also the indie narrative films that are suffering. And I think it's a pity because ultimately we're just giving the audience less interesting films. And we don't dare as much as the teams that are producing, directing them, to do the films with equity money because we're really worried about burning other people's money off.

27:41
Sigrid Dyekjær
We are in a time period now where we need to reinvent ourselves because the platforms aren't buying the films that we really burn for making. We came out of the hope that we wanted to change the world. Most of us are political, semi political. We do documentaries because we want to engage and educate young people and educate our audiences.

28:02
Sigrid Dyekjær
We treasure that a filmmaker went to a specific place, got that access, found that incredible story, and actually kept on filming, kept on working on it to actually make a film and make a story that I, as an audience, I am being invited in to that very special place with those very special people, because there was a really ambitious and brave director and sometimes also a producer from the beginning.

28:30
Sigrid Dyekjær
We have an industry right now that is not able to meet these initiatives to why we wanted to do documentaries. Ultimately, it's the audience that is suffering. We are not helping our young people become more clever, learning about their societies, learning about other societies and who they are, meeting other people.

28:50
Sigrid Dyekjær
The whole polarized political field we have right now, both in America and in Europe, documentary films can really help educate young people. I definitely dream of the streamers taking that responsibility of making sure that young people get educated. Because right now what they get is music docs, sports docs, true crime, celebrity driven films that the celebrities have been executive producing themselves.

29:20
Sigrid Dyekjær
It's really gonna hurt the world. I don't know if Netflix should do a Netflix educational division or whatever they should do or if Amazon should do an Amazon educational division. But I think the big streamers who make so much money, it's just insane that they don't make sure that the world we leave our children is going to be a better world.

29:44
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that needs education, complexity, nuances. All that needs to be built in. And young people don't read. So what do they do? They watch movies, they use entertainment. So why aren't we feeling that responsibility?

29:59
Sigrid Dyekjær
And I think, yeah, we can complain, as documentary producers and directors, oh, nobody wants to buy my movie and blah, blah. I worked for 10 years and nobody wants to buy it. Yeah, we can sit down and complain.

30:10
Sigrid Dyekjær
But ultimately, we're actually making our world a less educated place, and we're making dumber and dumber people. And I think that is a crime, and we really need to break that system of just giving the audience what we think the audience wants, instead of giving the audience something new that they didn't know they needed in their life.

30:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I met Guy Davidi at a film festival in Kenya recently for a film that you produced called Innocence, which is about Israel.

30:44
Sigrid Dyekjær
It's a provocative film and a very tough film for a lot of people to watch for the fact that it's about militarization and young people. In Israel you do need to do military and you do need to do three years as a man, two years as a woman. It's from 18. You take these years away from young people and you militarize them.

31:06
Sigrid Dyekjær
The film shows that militarization is also in the culture. Innocence is about feeding the brain with military life discussions and talks, down to a scene in a kindergarten where the young children, four years, five years old, they're going to draw and the teacher says, you can draw anything you want. Here's some colors and here's papers and you can draw a tank and you can draw a soldier and you can draw a gun.

31:33
Sigrid Dyekjær
And this little girl, she starts drawing a flower. The teacher comes over and says, Oh, yeah, that's a nice flower, but you could also do a tank. It's like, how do you manipulate these children's brains so that the military becomes such a big part of your society? And the day comes and you're 18 and you're going to go into the military and you're so afraid you won't succeed because it's been built into your culture from baby.

31:59
Sigrid Dyekjær
Of course, right now, it's a pretty problematic film because of what's going on in the Middle East and the war in the Middle East. It's delicate to show it right now. It's done from diaries of deceased soldiers. And it's young people telling you how they feel.

32:14
Sigrid Dyekjær
It's a film that'll last more than the war, hopefully. And I think this film will still be a film we'll look at in the future. The world is not more peaceful. And there's not less war going on in the world right now. So I think we will look at this film again in like five years, 10 years.

32:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your films are thematically very different from each other. Innocence, as we just spoke about, is about grooming soldiers in Israel. Your film Under The Sky of Damascus is a film about women, a small female run theater group who sets up a play. Unfortunately, they don't quite succeed. Apolonia, Apolonia is about a female turning into an artist. What is it about a project that attracts you? What is it that makes a film interesting to you?

33:03
Sigrid Dyekjær
In the beginning of the film, she's trying to be an artist and there's very few female artists. We wanted to make this film, and Leah wants to make this film because she didn't look at a lot of films that could inspire her to become an artist where it's a woman becoming an artist.

33:18
Sigrid Dyekjær
I would say in general, I love female rights. I have two daughters. I care a lot about women's possibilities in free expression and being independent people and not being pushed or squeezed down because of their gender. They have to have the same opportunity as men and men have been sitting on the power for the whole history.

33:38
Sigrid Dyekjær
So I feel it's our turn now to build back some power coming from women and I have a lot of strong women in my family. So it's also something I've felt ever since I was a child. That's really what I wanted to spend my time on.

33:54
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that's why I love doing Under The Sky of Damascus, because it is about a young group of women in Syria. The war is not there anymore. The war of the women, the war in the houses, you would say the invisible war is really for women to have equal opportunities as men.

34:11
Sigrid Dyekjær
So I'm very proud of that film. And it was super tough to shoot because we could not go to Syria and shoot it and had to do it remotely, a bit like the remote shootings like The Cave. And I did promise Dr. Amani that I would come back to Syria, I would be interested in Syria when the war was over and not just be interested in that country because there was a war.

34:32
Sigrid Dyekjær
And so Under The Sky of Damascus was really for me a love piece and a really beautiful film to make. And the women we have in the film are so powerful, so strong and so clever.

34:43
Sigrid Dyekjær
So I would say I produce films that touches me and I produce films where very often it's some sort of minority that has a hard time coming out with their message and has a hard time figuring out how to deal with their life and how to be in this world in a good, healthy, proper way of them trying to fulfill their best potential.

35:09
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that also counts for the films that I have in development right now. Yeah, I think I tend to love films that have something at their heart, like they want to tell me something, they want to engage me, and they want to share with me a secret or some secret life I didn't know about.

35:27
Sigrid Dyekjær
They move me and they want me to create change. I want to go out of that cinema and think, what can I do to help? Or, what can I do to change stuff? And with Apolonia, Apolonia, I'm like, how can I help young women that want to be artists? How can I make sure that the next painting I buy, or the next piece of art I buy, it's going to be made by a woman?

35:50
Sigrid Dyekjær
I'm not going to buy anything that's not made by a woman. There's so many small things you can do in your daily life to make sure that health and security and career and stability can be given to women who are trying to pursue it for themselves, as well as indigenous people in Brazil in This Territory that did not have stability, did not have security and has a really tough life because the rainforest is being chopped down and that is their home.

36:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which, also has a strong woman in it—

36:27
Sigrid Dyekjær
Very strong woman.

35:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— I have to add to that. And you're a very strong woman who is very successful. Why do you think you've managed to break through internationally? What is the explanation for this?

35:39
Sigrid Dyekjær
I would say I'm hungry. And I always want to do better. I always want to make better films. I always want to reach more audiences. And Denmark is very small. There's five million people. So I'm like, okay, that's too small for me. So how do I get into the business of actually trying to make these stories get out to wider audiences?

37:00
Sigrid Dyekjær
Apolonia, Apolonia is, in a way, a very Danish film, some people could say. But I do actually feel that it's a film that embraces the world. And it focuses so centrally on what it means to become an artist that it could be in America. It could be in Africa. It could be anywhere that a woman tries to become an artist.

37:22
Sigrid Dyekjær
I think a lot of people could make films internationally. I don't think a lot of people want to make films internationally. It is a bit tiring that you always have to be on a zoom call at eight o'clock at night and it's a little tiring for your family that you always need to travel. So it's not for everybody. It's for some.

37:38
Sigrid Dyekjær
And I would say, if it's for you, it's maybe because you keep feeling hungry and you keep feeling that you could reach more audiences. You could make an even better film than you did the last time. And you feel that this little specific group of people, nobody takes their voice and helps them come out with their message. And you think, Oh, I think I can make a difference. I'm not sure I can, but at least I have the idea that I can.

38:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you think that you brought any sort of special Danish ingredient or recipe to the table?

38:16
Sigrid Dyekjær
Yeah, I think Danish people, I'm going to generalize a lot, right? But what's so special about Denmark — It's so safe, so peaceful. Our children can bicycle to school. They get a paycheck every month when they study by the government. It's just a very, very safe place to grow up.

38:33
Sigrid Dyekjær
And that's why it's also a bit boring. When somebody comes with an idea, we're like, Oh, that's interesting. Oh, I think I can do this, this, this to it. And then I think it can get out of Denmark. Like I think we have a lot of — I wouldn't call it power — it's more like we're very brave.

38:53
Sigrid Dyekjær
A lot of us are really brave because we don't really think of the consequences, in a way, because we can always come back, fall back on our safety net that we have at home. And we do like to be adventurous. And we love storytelling. We're all built on Hans Christian Andersen. We're all built on Karen Blixen.

39:12
Sigrid Dyekjær
We also know nobody cares about the Danes. You don't care about five million people. If somebody should take us seriously, we really need to be good at telling these stories because otherwise people are just not going to be that interested in us.

39:25
Sigrid Dyekjær
We are also pretty good collaborators because we are just five million people. We do need to collaborate with other cultures, other people, other backgrounds and that makes us a very popular place to do film.

39:38
Sigrid Dyekjær
A lot of filmmakers want to come to Denmark and do editing or sound or the whole craft. A film that was very successful last year, Oscar-nominated, by an incredible Indian filmmaker, Shaunak Sen. His film team was pretty Danish — Danish editor, Danish sound designer, the Danish mix. He was a lot in Denmark.

39:58
Sigrid Dyekjær
We love the collaboration and we love other cultures to come and shine a little light on our boring lives, that I think we embrace them.

40:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned we're good at storytelling. What is it that makes Danish films so successful?

40:13
Sigrid Dyekjær
I didn't go to the Danish Film School, but the Danish Film School created some language, a creative language of how do you collaborate with the editor, the sound designer, the composer. We even now have a new line, which is set designers. And we've script writers and they all go to the same school together with each other and make films with each other, the DoPs, the sound designers.

40:33
Sigrid Dyekjær
The language between the different crafts is really well groomed and well educated and well done. And the rest of us who didn't go to the Danish Film School were so lucky to work with a lot of people that got to the Danish Film School that we learned that language, too.

40:50
Sigrid Dyekjær
Storytelling isn't just one director with an idea. That director really needs a good script writer and an amazing DoP that understands how to build their vision into a film. They need amazing costume designers that really know what this director's vision is. So the whole collaborative way of doing it is very special.

41:10
Sigrid Dyekjær
We are also such a small industry that a lot of people do both docs and narratives and that makes us special, I think, in the doc world, because our editors one day would edit a narrative film, other day edit a documentary film. For them it's not about oh, this is a doc so we gotta do it this way.

41:29
Sigrid Dyekjær
For them it's really like, oh it's a story, it's a story, and this story just took its starting point in reality, whereas the narrative story took its starting point in a script. But basically we treat the story in the same way. We don't differentiate whether it's a narrative or documentary when we actively make them.

41:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Sigrid, my final question to you. You're obviously very accomplished, and you've produced a lot of movies, but is there anything on your list that you would still like to achieve?

42:02
Sigrid Dyekjær
I don't work that way. I never look that far. Maybe that's why I can do these very crazy long films because I do not think about many years out ahead of me. I think my dream is that I can work always, and that I don't need to stop working and I can work until I'm not here anymore, cause I love my work. My work is like my hobby. So yeah, I just don't want to stop. I just don't want to stop working.

42:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate that you participated in Danish Originals.

42:37
Sigrid Dyekjær
Thank you so much for having me.

42:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Sigrid Dyekjær chose Kirsten Justesen's Surfacing / Oven Vande from 1990 to 1992 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.