The Copenhagen-based writer-director discusses the emotional basis of her touching debut feature.
Sylvia Le Fanu’s debut feature My Eternal Summer [+] tells the story of a family in limbo. Fifteen-year-old Fanny is not thrilled to spend the summer with her parents at their vacation home, but it’s the only way to be close to her terminally ill mother. Cineuropa spoke to the director ahead of the film’s world premiere at the 72nd San Sebastián Film Festival.
Cineuropa: The location being an island off the coast of Denmark is very important for the tone and setting of My Eternal Summer. Where did you shoot?
Sylvia Le Fanu: On an island south of Denmark, called Langille, which means “the long land”. It’s quite secluded: it takes a while to get there from central Copenhagen, as it was also important that the audience could feel that distance.
Was it more a question of atmosphere than practical considerations?
I think of finding locations as casting, and particularly with this film, it was clear that this house would be the fourth character in the film, alongside the three main characters. So obviously, the first criteria had to be, where could you possibly imagine dying? Where would you want to spend your last moments? It had to be somewhere that had sentimental value for the family, not a rented beach house. There had to be a feeling of lived life and memory, but also nature. It was very important to have the sea close, as it plays some sort of a role in the film, too.
What about the house itself? It’s much more than just a background for this family’s intense relationships with life and death.
I like that it has an upstairs and a downstairs, because the staircase became an important topos and unit for the film. This is how our main character Fanny can escape upstairs to her room and because of the mother's physical disability, it's hard for her to reach her daughter there. But that was one of the house’s gifts, it wasn’t on the list of things we were looking for.
It doesn’t seem like geography is that important here, either.
My background, in fact, is British, and my childhood landscapes are those of southern England. It was important for me to find somewhere with some of those qualities, and it’s not as dramatic as the cliffs there. But there were certainly some traits that were similar and that, for personal reasons, made that place feel familiar [to me].
The atmosphere of your film is very palpable, but impossible to describe with a single word. How does the script evoke those feelings and the atmosphere you wanted to create?
I’d say the way we [co-writer Mads Lind Knudsen and I] write is very intuitive and we always write with feeling before anything else. Even before working out the logistics and the logic of the film, we’re very much trying to capture the emotional truth of every moment. Our scripts are very minimalistic—they’re mostly dialogue and perhaps very simple descriptions—leaving a lot of space for collaborations with the cinematographer, the production designer, the sound designer, to fill in the blank spaces. For a film like this, I find it very important, since it’s not plot-driven. It has to have that openness and airiness in order to invite others, I guess.
Yes, I’d say My Eternal Summer is really built on moments, and there's something quite spectacular and also quite mundane about these moments, shared between the teenage daughter and her dying mother. How would you describe their relationship?
This has been one of the most difficult things, and of course, the more important something is, the more difficult it is! I remember we got a lot of notes on the script to "always make sure to show how much they love each other." But I was surprised by how hard it was to write many of these moments, because the truth—to me, of course, since this is inspired by my own experience even if it’s not identical—was that in that period of waiting when the film takes place, there is distance between mother and daughter. I think that is a preparation for the ultimate distance of her [the mother] not being there anymore. I wanted to capture how being so close to death, in a sense, imbues both the good and the bad in life with intensity. To experience the depth and enormity of life, that can be overwhelming and make you freeze a little bit because it can be too much to handle, emotionally.
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