The Window In Stockholm, the new project from German director Wilfried Hauke, promises to show Lindgren in an unfamiliar light. The film, presented in the Observer + section of the Nordisk Panorama Forum, draws heavily on the author’s wartime diaries, written during a period when she was experiencing turmoil in her private life.
“This diary was unknown around the world. We didn’t know about it before 2015 when the Lindgren family decided to publish it,” Hauke points out. “They [the family] decided more than 10 years after her death to publish these diaries.”
The diaries consist of seventeen small handwritten schoolbooks. These were discovered in the flat in which the author spent much of her life – and where she also worked on her children’s novels.
“There are so many intimate things in this diary, about her private life and her crisis with her husband Sture Lindgren,” the director speculates why the diary was kept out of circulation for so long. “We have here a very new side of Astrid Lindgren’s life.”
Lindgren wasn’t to become famous as an author until after the war. The diary captures her at a key formative moment in her creative life. It reflects her grief and anxiety at the tumultuous events going on around her. It also contains her observations of life in wartime Stockholm. She was a committed anti-Nazi who used to cut out articles from the newspapers relating to the war and paste them into notebooks.
“Like every German child, I grew up with the books of Astrid Lindgren. My own children too and now my grandchildren are also reading Astrid Lindgren,” Hauke notes. He jokes that readers of different generations of German kids have come to need Lindgren’s stories, “almost like bread and butter.” They respond to the humanism and idealism in her fiction.
When the diaries were published in Germany, Hauke spotted them in a bookshop and immediately bought a copy. ”I started to read it and I was fascinated from the first lines.”
In the diary entries, Hauke discovered “a young lady in Stockholm whom nobody knows. She has a lot of problems.” She is in neutral Sweden but is still deeply affected by what is happening in the war.
The challenge for the director is how to make a film based around the writer’s wartime confessionals. “There are so many films, biopics and documentaries, some of them very nice, about Astrid Lindgren,” he notes. Almost all of these films start with the idea that Lindgren is already an “icon” and that her rise to fame was smooth and inevitable.
“Now, I think it is time to tell a new story, not only about the unknown things – that she worked for the Swedish secret service, she had a lot of problems with her husband and so on – but also what happened when you start to write a diary and are in a dialogue with yourself.”
Hauke believes that writing the diary helped Lindgren both to “come through a crisis” and to discover “a new passion to write, to live through writing.” It was during this period, as the author’s daughter Karin Nyman later wrote, that Lindgren, “in the midst of the convulsive tensions of the time,” hatched her first “unbridled stories of wild, freedom-loving Pippi Longstocking.” They were originally intended as bedtime stories for her own family but would soon become a publishing phenomenon.
The documentary will be using footage of the Second World War. Hauke has tried to find private archive footage shot in colour, where possible, and offering a “personal” view on the upheavals of the period. “It’s more amateur footage, not from the official propaganda side.”
The film is being made through Hauke’s Kiel-based company, IDA Film & TV Produktion. It already has support from SVT and ARTE/NDR.
“It’s a feature film for cinemas, 90 to 100 minutes. Of course, because of the financing, we also will sell it worldwide and give it to the broadcasters,” the director explains the strategy for releasing The Window In Stockholm. At the Nordisk Panorama, he will be looking for Swedish partners. The project has a relatively high budget primarily because the footage is so expensive to access.
“We have been in very nice conversations with the Astrid Lindgren company, especially with [her] grandchildren. Now, we have signed a contract. We are very happy. They are very happy…I hope that they feel it is not such a bad idea to give this diary to a German producer and director!”
Sometimes, Hauke reflects, it helps to have “a little more distance” from a Swedish legend like Lindgren than local filmmakers. Hauke is an expert on Scandinavian literature and culture. As a filmmaker, he has made dramas, documentaries and biopics.
“It was always my idea to combine my knowledge about the north and also my passion for drama, for film, for theatre,” Hauke reflects on his goals as a filmmaker. He is in Malmö as part of the German delegation invited to the event this year and is relishing the chance to pitch his project to potential Nordic partners.
