making of att våga livet (Daring Life), March 2015

Our visual planning was all about a silent Helsinki inundated with heaps of snow, but in 2015 that winter never came. We had to shoot grey streets and bare trees. In the end we liked it. We wanted to convey our main character’s mental landscapes through the visuals of the film, including her experience of a mental ward during psychosis – no easy feat without going cheesy. We opted for the slightly bizarre and oddly beautiful atmosphere of the Töölö Rowing Stadium in Helsinki, in order to convey the sense of the surreal that permeates our main character’s descriptions of those experiences. Cinematographer Marita Hällfors took a series of great architectonic stills there. There wasn’t room for as many of them in the film as we would have liked, so here’s a selection of some of the left-outs along with some making-of pics of our team in action.

Images of the filmteam in action on Instagram