There are two landscapes in the life of Norwegian filmmaker, Gunnar Hall Jensen. One “normal landscape” existed before his son, Jonathan, 21, was murdered in Brazil in 2023. The other is the world he lives in today defined by sorrow and trauma and for which, as he tells Business Doc Europe, “there are no maps.”
As quickly becomes apparent in Jensen’s new film, Portrait Of A Confused Father (screening in Nordic Dox at CPH:DOX), the filmmaker was a very devoted dad. He chronicled every aspect of Jonathan’s life on camera from the moment his son was a toddler until not long before his tragic death.
“I could function as a filmmaker in a normal landscape for long hours of the day where actually I just pushed away the reality…then, in the evening, it is a breakdown situation,” the director explains the awful challenge of making a movie about his son while still grieving him.
“You function in a normal landscape and then you break down,” Jensen repeats the pattern of his life now. In the evenings, after he has finished work for the day, his wife will often find him crying.
Jensen has been making documentaries about his own life for many years now,
“It started with my first film Gunnar Goes Comfortable (2003) which was a kind of dissecting of my own personality – a lot of sexuality, relationship with my father, mother and such,” the director sums up the elements that fed into his early work.
He had “major psychical and psychological breakdown” when he was around 30 – and this became a key formative moment in his development as a filmmaker.
“I went into therapy, I did a lot of meditation and I just realised transparency is good,” Jensen explains why he is now so relentlessly honest about himself in his work. He believes that this emotional frankness is liberating for audiences. “It is, or was, a positive process for me…I am not the most traditional filmmaker but what I felt I had to offer was authenticity.”
It sometimes seems that Jensen never goes anywhere without a camera.
“After Jonathan’s tragic death, I didn’t do it so much but I hope it will come back,’ he says of the compulsion to document his life.
The film premiering in Copenhagen this weekend actually started as an investigation into ‘what is love.’ The director would ask his family for insight and definitions. Jonathan, though, was sceptical. He thought this was a pretentious project, far too generalised to make sense.
“He was being smarter than me. He realised what kind of stupid project was that!”
When it comes to fathers, Jensen didn’t have much of a role model. His own dad “let me down.” Jensen only met him once or twice. That was one of the main reasons he was determined himself to be as good a father as possible for Jonathan – and to capture his efforts on camera.
“I film but I don’t necessarily know what I am filming,” he says of all the material he shot over the years.
Sometimes, the director brought in cinematographers. For example, when he was taking Jonathan on a character-building cross-country trek through the snow, “then I brought in my professional friend and he did it [filming] for free as a favour…my friends, they love to help me.”
For obvious reasons, the underlying mood of the film is sombre. Nonetheless, there is humour and energy here too. Jensen reveals at the start what happened to Jonathan. “Then the next two thirds of the film are with this dark cloud over it but they just show a father and son trying to connect the best way they can.”
The relationship has ups and downs but Jonathan is a bright and precocious kid, full of energy.
The director wanted the audience to get “so sucked into the daily process between me and Jonathan that they kind of forget” about the grim revelation at the start of the documentary.
“Life is tragicomic,” he explains why he was so keen that viewers should look beyond Jonathan’s death. “I don’t go deeply into the killing because it is not a true crime film…I wanted people to feel the love, to feel the humour, to feel the paradoxes, to feel the mistakes, to feel our personalities – and to be seduced into that during the viewing. It would be very tempting to go for the maximum melodrama because of the tragedy but I didn’t want to do that and I don’t think it is good for the audience.”
One strand of the film focuses on the legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen whom Jensen used to idolise. There is evocative black and white archive footage of Amundsen on his various expeditions with his sledges, dogs and hot air balloons. “He is important for me, as is told in the film. It was very important to have him here because, whether Jonathan and me like it or not, we are part of that culture and genetics. Let’s not call it manly. Let’s call it masculine….”
Both Jensen and his son are shown as sharing Amundsen’s sense of adventure and willingness to take risks. It’s as if this is a Norwegian trait shared by generations of men. Jensen’s own father went to the Mexican gulf as a seaman when he was 17.
“Amundsen was fantastic and very inspiring in many ways but he was a flawed hero in many ways,” the director reflects. One story he didn’t include in the film is how Amundsen visited a poor Eskimo family, adopted two girls he saw there but then simply grew bored with them and sent them back. “That’s horrible, just horrible. Maybe he felt that attachment, love, like this, would make him weak…”
Jensen’s wife features only fleetingly in the film – and for good reasons. “With all of my personal films, from the very beginning, my wife has said very clearly she does not want to be part of them. She is not a supporter of being that transparent about the intimacy of personal lives. She has not been too happy about my previous films…but she can see the value of what I am doing now.”
The documentary was made through Upnorth Film with support from BBC Storyville. France’s Little Big Story and Sweden’s Film Väsernorrland, are co-producers. DR is handling sales. Norsk Filmdistribution is handling the Norwegian release and several other territories are sold.
Jensen hopes this is a universal story, “a kind of zeitgeist document about how lost young boys can be in this digital world with gurus and influencers, and how fast it goes.”
As for doing press and publicity for such a raw and personal film, Jensen is still getting to grips with that.
“It’s a very ambivalent situation because on the one side, yes, it is positive we have the film but the down side, which is bigger of course, is that this situation, when the film is being shown, it forces me into the tragic landscape and the memories of Jonathan, of course,” he reflects. “I am trying to build up strength to do it because I think it’s a film that can be important for both parents and their children. On one side, I talk as a professional filmmaker but I have one leg also which is totally in the tragedy and so I have to be a little bit careful with myself, that’s for sure.”
