ANIARA
Point Of No ReturnWWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
SWEDISH FILMMAKERS PELLA KÅGERMAN AND HUGO LILJA TELL US WHY
THEIR ADAPTATION OF A CLASSIC POEM HAS NEVER BEEN MORE RELEVANT
WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL| 051
“IN TORONTO WHERE we
premiered, the audience was very engaged
and asked so many good questions, but
after the Q&A this young girl came up to
us. She had just turned 17 and said that this
described her generation with the feeling that
it’s all over. The generation growing up now,
for them climate change is realer in a sense
that hope is lost.”
We’re talking to Swedish filmmakers Pella
Kågerman and Hugo Lilja about Aniara,
their award-winning adaptation of Harry
Martinson’s epic 1956 poem inspired by
the fears of living through the Cold War.
Decades later, the story of Aniara has found
new resonance. A luxury spaceship carrying
passengers away from the doomed Earth to a
new life on Mars suddenly veers irrevocably
off course. As the years pass, everyone on
board begins to react to the catastrophe in
different ways. Some stubbornly carry on
as usual, some find solace in the VR room
named Mima (for a while, anyway), and
others begin to get a little... unpredictable.
It’s thought-provoking SF that speaks to a
sense of hopelessness that many are feeling,
but the duo tells us that it wasn’t just the
climate change parallels that piqued their
interests when they first started to develop a
film version four years ago. “It was more the
existential drama,” Kågerman explains. “The
poem was written 60 years ago and it was
concerning climate change but also nuclear
fears. I think the whole escalation; it feels
like we entered the apocalypse just a year
ago. When we finished sound editing there
was this heat wave in Sweden and we went
out and it was like... burning everywhere.”
“I remember that we were on set, shooting
in this shopping mall when Trump became
the President. I think he puts our captain
in perspective because our captain is so put
together compared to Trump,” she laughs.
“We really live in turbulent times.”
While the poem is a staple of the Swedish
education system (both Kågerman and Lilja
read it in school), Aniara found a particular
place in Kågerman’s heart after she saw a
Swedish stage adaptation as a child. “I hadbeen to a Stockholm theatre with my granny
that I was close to growing up, and the night
after that she had a severe stroke and she
ended up in a hospital, and then I started to
read the book for her aloud,” she remembers.
“We had always read a lot of books growing
up, kind of role play them, so we started to
role play on the Aniara when she was getting
better in hospital and we pretended that this
hospital was the spacecraft and the doctors
were the crew, and then the sick people werethe passengers. Because it’s also about what
we do in life, that we are born, that we age
and we die. The poem is about that too, what
to do with your time.”
Although there have been plays, an opera
and at least one album based on Aniara, it’s
only been adapted for screen once before (a
1960 TV movie) and Lilja tells us that turning
103 cantos into a workable screenplay
wasn’t easy: “It’s different with the stage
adaptations, they use the original text more.
It’s more narrative theatre, because there’s
not much dialogue in the text.”
Then there was the question of what
the ship itself would actually look like.
The Aniara in the film doesn’t feel too
far removed from a cruise ship, but
Kågerman points to a different kind of
luxury playground. “Las Vegas,” she
grins. “We were in Las Vegas and that felt
very spaceship-like. There is this famous
psychoanalyst whose basic argument is that
we can’t see into the future, we’re so formed
by the time we’re living in and we’re just
a medium for the time, so when you try to
depict the future you end up depicting thenow. Like the Sixties spacecrafts still look
kind of Sixties. We wanted to just add these
contemporary layers, so we call Aniara no-
set sci-fi, we’re not in the studio, we’re on
real locations, and mixing them together.
Creating the ship from the interior and then
creating the exterior somehow.”
Sets or no sets, there were inevitably
challenges for the first-time feature
filmmakers when it came to bringing their
future convincingly to life. “A lot,” nodsLilja with a smile. “There were some design
issues we had from the beginning with our
technology level. It was just too much for
our budget. It’s a complex story and it’s a lot
of locations over a long time, so we had to
do a lot of reshoots and stretch the budget.
Some of the scenes were shot in our living
room, they were inserts, and I had to learn
After Effects to do some of the easier effects
myself. There’s a lot of tutorials on YouTube!”
The end result is something very special;
a sci-fi that explores the far reaches of space
while still connecting with our growing
sense of panic. But Kågerman doesn’t want
the audience to feel that hope is lost. “What
we wanted people to feel in the end, we had
the goal that people would be happy to be on
this spacecraft, Earth,” she explains. “You’re
not on the Aniara, there is hope. We feel like
it’s kind of hopeful because we’re not there
yet. During those four years seven or eight
crew members had children so we somehow
believe in the future!”Aniara is released in cinemas and on demand
from 30 August.The sets were inspired
by current tech.