Danish producer Monica Hellström already has two Oscar nominations to her credit, both for Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, in the Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature categories last year. Now, she is back in the running for awards, for Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters. What’s more, after more than a decade working with production company Final Cut For Real, she set up her own outfit, Ström Films, last summer.
“I think I felt like something new should happen,” Hellström explains to Business Doc Europe the decision to launch the new company. It seemed a good moment too. She had three films which were completed more of less the same time: Flee, A House Made Of Splinters and Cille Hannibal’s He’s My Brother. “I felt it was the right time and it has been a really nice and gentle process of just starting the company.” She adds, that, that she is continuing to work with Final Cut For Real “on these amazing films that we produce together.”
A House Made Of Splinters premiered at Sundance 2022 just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The documentary is set in Ukrainian orphanage that its director discovered when he making his previous film, The Distant Barking Of Dogs(2017), also set in Ukraine and which Hellström also produced.
“It was quite amazing that when the war broke out, it activated both films in an enormous way,” Hellström says of how she and Lereng Wilmont used the two documentaries to draw attention to the plight of kids caught up in the conflict.
Azad Safarov, the line producer on A House Made Of Splinters, and his colleague Lena Rozvadovska set up the NGO Voices Of Children to support kids traumatised by war. This organisation also helped evacuate children caught up in the conflict.
Hellström and Lereng Wilmont have been working with Voices Of Children, raising money through screenings for the organisation. They’re also preparing a new documentary project which will be made in Moldova. “We’ve got some development support from the Danish Film Institute and he [Lereng Wilmont ] is researching that now,” she says of Brigada, which will be their fifth film together. (She calls their collaboration “a long marriage.”) It’s still too early, though, for her to reveal the subject matter.
The producer also has a new US-based fiction project in development with Jonas Poher Rasmussen.
“For me, the relationship with the filmmaker is really, really important,” she says. She worked for nine years with Jonas Poher Rasmussen to produce Flee. “You grow together…you develop. You create a team and a way of talking about the filmmaking and the process. It is a very personal relationship you gain because you work so closely together.”
The stories which both directors (Simon Lereng Wilmont and Jonas Poher Rasmussen) work on tend to be “very sensitive.” They are also perfectionists. That’s why the documentaries take so long to complete.
Hellström wants her new company “to stand for ambitious, creative documentary films and fiction films.” She will also co-produce. She is involved in a new project from leading Swedish producer Marie Kjellson (Force Majeure) and will also co-produce Ukrainian director Alisa Kovalenko’s Frontline which was pitched at IDFA in November. “It’s really a story of what it is like for a woman and a mother to leave your kids at home to defend your country.” The doc is being produced through Kasia Kuczyńska for Polish outfit Haka Films.
Perhaps predictably, the success of Flee has led to Hellström being approached by other filmmakers with animated documentary projects. Fellow producers have also told her that it is now easier to finance animated documentary because Flee has shown that audiences will accept it.
The producer is upbeat about the current state of Danish documentary. “We’re very lucky that we have a good support system…and we have a really good film school,” she reflects. “It [documentary] is a very generous branch in Denmark. We are very willing to share. When we do test screenings, we can bring in other directors and editors to be consultants on projects.”
The Danish doc sector has also managed to withstand the market turbulence caused in recent years by the arrival of the major streamers.
It helps that companies tend to be small and very focused. “To start with, it’s just me!” Hellström notes of her own company. She finances films on a project by project basis – and will bring in freelancers when films get too a stage where they are needed.
As for this year’s Oscar race, the producer acknowledges that A House Made Of Splinters (sold by Cinephil) is a bit of an outsider. “I think this year is very different than with Flee because with Flee, of course, we were working with [US distributor] Neon and had a big, huge team behind the film.”
There has nevertheless been “a strong team” around Splinters since its Sundance launch last January. The Russian invasion has also given the documentary an extra topicality.“It is a very different campaign we are running with A House Made Of Splinters (with Cinetic Media) but I think we’re just so grateful to get this platform to talk about what is happening in Ukraine and what is happening with the kids and to pay attention to that,” the producer states. “We just had the really amazing news that Kolya, the main character, has been adopted [locally]. We’re still in touch,” she adds of the strong links the filmmakers have established with their subjects.
