Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson & Sturla Brandth Grøvlen Interview — Contenders Worldwide – Deadline

Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s coming-of-age drama Stunning Beings debuted within the Panorama part on the Berlin Movie Pageant, the place it gained the Europa Cinemas Label award. The movie has additionally been chosen as Iceland’s entry for the 2023 Oscars.

The movie follows Addi, a teenage boy raised by a clairvoyant mom, who adopts a bullied child into his group of violent misfits and begins to expertise a collection of dreamlike visions.

RELATED: The Contenders Worldwide – Deadline’s Full Protection

“It’s impressed by my youth rising up within the suburbs of Reykjavik,” Guðmundsson mentioned of the movie’s origins throughout Deadline’s Contenders Movie: Worldwide panel. “I used to be a part of this group of boys who used their violent habits to cope with issues. It’s nonetheless a fictional story, however the origins come from my neighborhood again in these days.”

Stunning Beings, from Altered Innocence, is Guðmundsson’s second function collaboration with Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, and the movie shares a equally intimate visible language with their earlier work. 

“We’ve identified one another for a few years and did two brief movies collectively earlier than we did Heartstone, which was Guðmundur’s debut movie, and I feel it was by means of the method of the brief movies that we began growing this very intimate and intuitive model of taking pictures,” Grøvlen mentioned.  

Guðmundsson described the method of taking pictures on set with Grøvlen as a “dance” between the pair and their actors. 

Stunning Beings can also be Guðmundsson’s second function to be predominantly primarily based on the lives of Icelandic teenagers. He informed Deadline that the younger actors drafted in for this movie had been found throughout an open casting name. 

“Now we have an open casting in Iceland as a result of we’ve got a restricted variety of children who need to be in movies of that age,” he mentioned, “so we attempt to get all of them in for the casting, after which it turns into the lengthy strategy of discovering the best group dynamic.” 

Guðmundsson added that his casting course of takes place over a yr earlier than taking pictures begins, the place he locations the younger performers in a workshop the place they’re educated and slowly launched to the script. He added that his eventful adolescence formed his curiosity in tales about younger individuals. 

“These are simply the tales which have come to me to date,” he mentioned. “Perhaps as a result of I had a wealthy youth as a child. And I spotted how grown-ups don’t see the identical world as us. And I usually wished I may present my dad and mom how my associates actually had been, each the nice and unhealthy sides.”

Examine again Monday for the panel video.