Nordic Talents 2018 winner Fanny Ovesen is among three film school graduates who received support from the Swedish Film Institute’s new development initiative. 

Wild Card was set up earlier this year by the SFI to help promising new directors, freshly graduated from film schools, get a quicker go at long feature filmmaking. The support consists of three development grants of SEK 400,000 to create a sketch film for a feature or hybrid fiction film. 

The recipients of the first Wild Card grants were announced yesterday at Filmhuset Stockholm, during the Stockholm International Film Festival.

  • Fanny Ovesen for Laura
    Swedish born Ovesen just graduated from the Norwegian Film School with the short film She-Pack. In September she won the coveted Nordic Talents pitch prize for her feature project Laura. Inspired by real events, the film will be an intense road movie with an edge.

    While on a couch-surfing trip through Europe, 19-year old Laura wakes up, having had sex with a stranger. Torn between guilt and innocence, she sets out on a journey which will influence her self-image and close relationships forever.

    The Wild Card jury said: ”The director is brutally spot-on and makes a real knockout in her graduation film She-Pack, about relationships and group dynamics. The jury can’t wait to see how the director will continue to explore the female experience in a road movie about complex friendships.” 
  • Jerry Carlsson for Fire (Bränder)
    A graduate from the Swedish Alma Screenwriting programme, and Berlinale Talent Campus participant, Carlsson has directed the multi-awarded short film Shadow Animals. 

    The jury said they ’look forward to more of the director’s visual and emotional skills’, in his upcoming surrealistic drama Fire. Normality, silence and identity are the film’s themes. The main character’s isolation and frustration cause him anxiety, which is portrayed by fires breaking out, walls cracking and façades tumbling down.  
  • Ernst de Geer for Hypnosis (Hypnosen)
    De Geer graduated from the Norwegian Film School with the film The Culture, which picked up a Best Short Film Award at the Boston Film Festival.  The Wild Card jury said they look forward to seeing Hypnosis, a ’provocative, mind-boggling drama which aims to explore modern male and female roles’. What happens in a relationship when one partner, via hypnosis, loses their social barriers and the balance of the relationship is distorted?

Commenting on Wild Card winners, Helen Ahlsson, Moving Sweden Film Commissioner and head of the Wild Card selection jury said: ”Wild Card gives the talents of tomorrow a chance to let their voices be heard on a feature film straight after graduation. I am immensely proud of the young filmmakers we chose, and it is an absolute thrill to present the three winning projects to a wider audience.”