Aana, the new doc project from Swedish production outfit Film and Tell was pitched this week at Visions du Réel Industry. The film, which will complete in 2023, tells the intimate story of a young woman trying to live a normal life in spite of the late effects of the harsh cancer treatment she went through as a child.
As a child, Aana was diagnosed with a rare type of kidney cancer, recovering a few years later. But she fears a relapse, as well as the possibility of infertility in years to come.
While the major focus of the 80-minute doc will be on Aana, the film will feature a trio of characters. Her healthy skate-boarding friend Julia is a great support, but she also reminds Aana of a carefree youth, very different from her own. Ci, herself a former cancer patient now in remission, offers a different type of support. The two young women met in hospital and together share a deep connection based on their shared experience and the ongoing threat of relapse.
During the pitch co-director Åsa Ekman underline how they are “moving towards a film about a young woman searching for adulthood… Anna projects the loneliness and the sorrow of her own lost possibilities upon Julia, whereas Ci is the person who knows exactly where Ana is in life and what she has gone through.”
“Similar to my previous movies Pine Ridge (Official Selection Venice, 2013) and Transnistra (VPRO Award, 2019 IFFR Rotterdam) I am again working with young people,” said co-director Anna Eborn. “We did around 50 interviews with child cancer survivors, and listening to their voices my connection to their experiences and to this film grew very strong. Twenty-year-old Aana, she stood out. She comes from the very north of Sweden and has a calm, calm, beautiful, strong presence.”
“Having a regular job with regular hours or being able to have children in the future are obstacles for Aana, who has to face the late effects of the treatment for the rest of her life,” Eborn added.
The project’s third director, Oscar Hedin, worked with Ekman on Say Something (2015) and My Life, My Lesson (2014) which both premiered at IDFA, won the Swedish TV-prize Kristallen for Best Documentary two years in a row, and reached over ten million viewers.
The new project has a particular poignancy for Hedin, who has bone marrow cancer. “I got it as an adult. I have been thinking of course how does it affect a child to get cancer. Since it affected my life a lot, how does it affect the child’s life? And if you survive, what does life become like? This is something we can explore in this film,” he stressed.
Eborn tells how when Aana feels “overwhelmed with worries” she drops everything and goes on a solo camping trek. “We will follow her in those moments, out into the bare mountain planes up above the tree line where she goes to regain her strength. Nature will therefore play an important role in the cinematic style of this movie and it will be the environment where we meet Julia, Ci and Anna.”
“We are filming observationally,” Eborn added. “It is a movie shot digitally but with the method of analogue. In long hand-held takes we allow the scenes and the dialogue to go deep, but maintain the focused approach as when shooting on 16 [mm].”
Film and Tell producer Marina-Evelina Cracana confirmed that of the €500k budget production €85,000 is in place, secured from the Swedish Film Institute and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee. She is currently looking for co-producers (possibly France), pre-sales “and other types of funding to complete the development budget.”
