Welcome to Jutland, home of the Goths, not the Vikings. In Frigge Fri’s film Dark Blossoms, set in a small backwater town called Fjerritslev, three young friends are taking on the world. There’s Josephine, who has a ring through her nose; Nightmare, who is a Muslim Goth, and Jay, originally from the US. They’re immensely loyal to one another. They like the same music, the same clothes, the same jokes. But, then, one falls in love with an outsider. Suddenly, the bonds between them threaten to break.
“It all started with me being really fascinated about young people using Instagram as a platform to express themselves,” Fri says of her film, which has been winning rave reviews everywhere from CPH DOX to Hot Docs (and which is sold by Reservoir Docs). “I found out all these amazing subcultures were using Instagram to find friendships…and then I found this really amazing profile, Girly Goth.”
This was the account run by Josephine. Fri was “really drawn” to the wit and defiance of her posts but was also struck by her sense of “solitude and not fitting in in her surroundings.”
Josephine was living on the opposite side of the country from the filmmaker. Nonetheless, Fri resolved to visit her. “I thought, OK, there may be a story there,” she says of the Goths from Jutland. “It is totally in the countryside. It must be a crazy thing to look like that and live in this environment.”
When they had had their first conversation via Skype, Josephine had told her: “I am so bored. It is really nice that you have contacted me. I am really looking forward to having so much fun. Please come.”
“So I took my car and went to see her…”
Fri intends her film as a tribute to “strong but vulnerable outsiders.” It was also meant to be a story about friendship. “[But] when they suddenly broke up, for me it was horrible. My whole story about strong friendship just disappeared in front of my eyes. But then I found out that maybe a story about friendship is also a story about losing great friends.”
Some of the Goths’ habits are a little disconcerting. They like to boil the carcasses of animals and strip away their skin. “People think it’s scary and disgusting but they were [saying] like it’s beautiful. This bone, it looks so nice.”
The director, who shot the documentary herself, filmed a lot of footage with the Goths’ parents and also with Josephine’s classmates. In the end, though, she decided not to use this material. “I found out in the editing room that it somehow disturbed the story when there were too many young people…and the parents, to be honest, they were kind of annoying. They were always telling them [the Goths] how ugly they looked and weird they were. I wanted them to be more kind and supportive.”
Fri may not have been a Goth herself but her subjects accepted her into their world. “It is always good to have time with the cast to make them comfortable with the cameras but they were also used to cameras. It was pretty easy to film,” the director says. “It was really nice working with them.”
The three protagonists have now seen Dark Blossoms. “All of them had a really strong emotion about watching the film and they were really missing their friendship a lot. That was kind of beautiful to see, that the film could remind them of all the good stuff.”
The documentary has helped them reconcile. They may not now be best friends, as they were before, but they still support each other.
It is apparent that Fri identifies closely with her subjects. When she was an adolescent, she lived closer to Copenhagen and so it was easier for her to find her “tribe.” However, at school, she too felt like an outsider and encountered plenty of bullying. “I couldn’t really find anybody who had the same interests as me. I was part of a punk scene. Back then, there was a really famous occupied house in Copenhagen, a ‘youth house’ it was called,” she remembers the ‘alternative community’ that she discovered there.
Fri is a cinematographer as well as a director. She is now shooting Resorts, a documentary set in the Canary Islands. It’s about Scandinavians who visit the island in search of the sun and decide never to come home.
Meanwhile Dark Blossom, produced by Made In Copenhagen, is continuing its festival run and has been nominated for the ‘New Nordic Voice’ award at the Nordic Panorama.
As for the three Goths, they’re no longer in Jutland. Josephine is heading to London to study. Nightmare is already in Berlin. “They are at that age, 20 years old. They just want to see the world. It is so nice to see them grow up and live their lives!”
