Following Mona Fastvold’s first film, the thriller The Sleepwalker, the IndieWire website highlighted her in 2014 as a young director to look out for – alongside the likes of Damien Chazelle and Jennifer Kent. With The World to Come, she has delivered on this promise, and then some: her devastating love story, which opens the June installment of IFFR 2021, won the queer Lion in Venice and was highly regarded at the Sundance Festival.
The World to Come depicts a romance unfolding between two pioneer women, out of sight of their traditionalist husbands. They try to describe the feelings they have for one another, but their words are inadequate. Fastvold, however, is able to capture the first ecstatic blossoming of these lovers in her sensual camerawork and intuitive editing. The passing of the seasons and the stunning natural surroundings are inextricably intertwined with their day-to-day reality.
Fastvold was determined that her film should look very different from all those other pioneer movies, usually told from a male point of view. Despite have been born in Norway and growing up with the work of Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, she draws more inspiration from paintings and queer photography. In this Big Talk, festival director Vanja Kaludjercic talks to the director about how her work as a director relates to her work as a screenwriter.
