Veteran Danish filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen first went to Arizona in the 1980s – his 1984 film Phoenix Bird was a staged documentary about a Vietnam veteran who started an unusual survival school there. He enjoys the perspective he has when he visits America. “I feel at home, it’s like I’m a stranger among strangers.”
“I’ve made almost 50 films and I think at least 45 of them are made abroad,” he says. “Of course in another place you don’t have the facts or the everyday knowledge, but being a stranger can give you better eyes to see things from another angle, to show those people their world.”
Carlsen thought of Arizona more recently when he had the idea to make a film about teenagers exploring the idea of freedom. “I knew I wanted to do a story about freedom, and those Americans know something about freedom…and teenage years are the brightest time of a person’s life. There’s something about that bridge between childhood and maturity where you see the big quest in life.”
He began to look for American teenagers to take part in his film project, but was then inspired to return to Arizona because of the unique Western landscape he had explored decades earlier. “I fell in love with that landscape in Arizona,” Carlsen recalls. He chanced upon Winslow, Arizona as the setting for his new film by chance – he was driving through the state and needed to stop to find a place to sleep for the night. He came to a motel there and found this “wonderful, wonderful place. I always get enormously inspired by being in places where there is no reason for it to be your destination.”
Carlsen scouted the drama class at the local high school to start the film project – he gave the students the idea to create an original theatre piece inspired by their own lives and hopes for the future. He then filmed the process of them working on that play, but also uses their ideas as fictional jumping off points in which the students play versions of themselves.
He met with about 80 students but settled on five – Mackenzie, Amber, Sydney, Kristin and Bryson – who were the best fit both to inspire and star in the film. He started doing documentary-style interviews with each of them (not to be used in the film, just to get to know them). He says one common trait is “that they all have some kind of scars. Those scars can either bring them down or could make them wiser and more prepared to go on in life.” He also found it important to cast one young woman, Amber, who represents the Navajo way of life in the modern world. Of Amber, Bang Carlsen says, “she had a beautiful way of telling her story and also this combination of wanting to go away to fulfill yourself, and at the same time a total commitment to this culture she comes from.”
Carlsen likes doing staged documentaries that blend fact and fiction because “any reality is wearing a mask and you have to find a way to get behind the mask,” he says. “To invest something to move beyond reality into fantasy can help you get into the core of it.”
He adds how, “Winslow really welcomed me and they were very helpful in doing this film, and also being playful – we have to play around with this kind of film, and they embraced that, which I think was very courageous and very beautiful.”
Despite these kids living a world away from him, and in a different era, Carlsen knew he’d find a personal connection. “I have this certain idea that you can only make two films about something which is actually a projection of something within yourself, otherwise you’re not qualified to tell the story.”
He recalls his own childhood as sometimes “traumatic” because his parents “were nice people but non-functioning as parents” and he ended up in an institution for some years.
The process of making Dreaming Arizona helped him come to terms with his past, and understanding his own parents more. “One centre-piece in humanity is our fight to be able to love the people around us,” he says.
His young cast (and their parents) were game for his non-traditional approach to filmmaking. “They are very interested in life. And they are very vulnerable but also very courageous. I was amazed by that. I thought there might be some resistance to this rather radical approach. In some ways, they are more courageous than me.”
The project was started back in 2018, but it had to be paused during the
pandemic – also as he was coming to terms with the death of his wife in 2017, which inspired his very personal 2021 film The Banality of Grief. “In a way it was a godsend that I got a year (during lockdown) to concentrate on that movie.”
The very experienced filmmaker has many past doc credits including Just the Right Amount of Violence (2013), Purity Beats Everything (2007 and Addicted to Solitude (1999), and he has also worked in fiction writing and theatre. For Dreaming Arizona, his producers are Heidi Elise Christensen and Signe Byrge Sorensen for Denmark’s Final Cut for Real, with co-producers Ivo Felt for Allfilm, Tore Buvarp for Fenris Film, and his own company C&C Productions.
On Dreaming Arizona Carlsen shot some of the footage himself, but then brought in Estonian cinematographer Erik Põllumaa to work with some of the fictionalized scenes as well.
The cast won’t attend IDFA for the world premiere, but he plans to take the film back to Winslow for a community screening in early 2023. “It will be interesting to see how they react to the film because it goes to that edge,” the director notes.
Carlsen is thankful to IDFA for supporting more artistic and inventive forms of documentary. “I think that IDFA has a concept about the documentary genre as an art form, not just a journalistic form. And I think that’s very important. We don’t want the TV stations standardizing the form into pure boredom.”
There’s no chance of boredom with his next project – a very inventive “operatic love story” starring real pigs. The director says, “I’ve already done test shoots with pigs in industrial areas and they have enormously expressive faces. They are very brainy animals.”
