Quotes

For me, Queen of Hearts (2019) is a sort of cautionary tale. But I have met many audience members who experience the film in other ways than I do. And I love that.

With Woman, Unknown I want to explore the idea of the female body as a public domain, a public matter for society to pass judgment on regardless of time and place. I am preoccupied with what it does to a person to carry the burden of a concealed secret for too long, the stigma, the shame - internalized and collective.

Mostly, I get inspired by stories or characters that face a big dilemma. I am very curious of nature and interested in almost everything and everybody. I read a lot and listen a lot. The reason why I love the medium of film so much is because it combines so many interests of mine. Psychology, visual art, fashion, music - the list is long. Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. We need each other in order to make a film and the beauty of that keeps me going.

It has been my ambition from the very beginning not to judge the characters but make space for interpretation so that the audience can draw their own conclusions.

As a female filmmaker representation is a discussion I have all the time with my female and male colleagues. As a woman coming from a minority background (my father is Egyptian), I have always longed to be represented in fiction. As I child, I felt invisible because there was almost no nonwhite representation in fiction in Scandinavia. And as a young woman I felt invisible because the fictional representation of womanhood was limited to the elaboration of the good wife, the caring mother and/or the woman torn between work-life and domestic life. I have longed to see complex and nuanced female characters on screen. I think on screen equality is not going to happen if we just reproduce the same old good-natured female characters. We have to dare to expose both women that do good and women that do bad in order to be relevant for a contemporary audience.