In stacks of sand

AA: What is your relationship to Anholt?

OHK: When I was a child, my mother took my sisters and me to Anholt. We got to experience life at Fyrgården. At first you had sand in your shoes. You try to fight back, not let the sand get in, but after a few days sand was everywhere. Afterwards, I always thought of it as a special place.

AA: Why shoot analog?

OHK: With film, you need to be focused. You can’t be careless, it always shows in the result. When you load a camera with film, you need to do it in total darkness. If you let the slightest light hit the negative, it can be completely destroyed, so you use a small portable darkroom, a tent. When you have taken the film out of its packaging and loaded a magazine into the tent, you take it out and thread it through the camera’s gears. This process is also very delicate, you mustn’t be in a hurry. And ideally you should not get any foreign objects into the interior of the camera, such as dust or sand. Then when you have loaded the camera, you have to measure the light and set the camera accordingly. So when you’ve loaded the magazine in the dark, loaded the camera, set up the lights, got your actors ready, well then you only have a few minutes to get it right because film is not only difficult to work with, it’s also very expensive! So why do I work in film? Because when you develop and see the result, you forget all that which was difficult. The colors that the film gives you make you fall in love.

AA: How long have you worked with film?

OHK: 15 years I believe!

AA: What was your first job?

OHK: I worked as a director for Avicii and filmed his tour videos.

AA: What has the process been like with the creation of the films for Grethe?

OHK: I wanted to visualize the emotions Alf felt when he created his perfumes and together we searched for them at Fyrgården for two weeks in July 2022.

AA: What was the biggest challenge?

OHK: Choosing what was best to film and distributing the amount of film.

AA: Are there any advantages to filming in a place like Fyrgården?

OHK: From a technical point of view, there are no advantages at all. Old film cameras cannot withstand saltwater sand. I had to send the camera in for service after I got home.

AA: If you had to pick one clip from the movies (incl. material that didn’t make it into the final cut), which was your favorite scene?

OHK: As the jeep approaches the lighthouse. It’s like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel <3