“When you work with great producers like Patrik [Andersson] and Jakob [Abrahamsson], you can do anything, even under the current difficulties in documentary filmmaking,” British filmmaker Lorna Tucker tells us from her home in London.
Tucker, a relatively new figure in indie British filmmaking, makes a distinction with documentary filmmaking because she has just launched her latest feature Garbo: Where Did You Go?, a doc on the life of screen legend Greta Garbo.
The film was produced by Abrahamsson and Andersson’s Stockholm-based Mylla Films in collaboration with Embankment Films. The project is the first international co-production from Mylla — a sign of the company’s growing ambitions and resources. Andersson and Abrahamsson launched the company in 2022 and have quickly become two of the buzziest figures in Scandinavian cinema. In a sign of their popularity, Göteborg Film Festival head Pia Lundberg even name-checked the duo during a recent pre-festival interview with us.
The two self-described film nerds have known each other since the 1990s when they worked as writers and programmers at the Stockholm Film Festival. Abrahamsson’s background is in distribution. He is the CEO and co-owner of the buzzy Nordic and Baltic distribution company NonStop Entertainment. He also runs the popular arthouse cinema Capitol in Stockholm. Andersson is an experienced producer with credits on pics like Lisa Langseth’s Euphoria and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. We spoke with the duo alongside Tucker this week at Göteborg.
“It’s a great collaboration,” Abrahamsson says of working with Andersson.
Narrated by Noomi Rapace, Garbo: Where Did You Go? opened this month in Swedish cinemas and serves as one of the few locally-produced features that will play theatrically this year in Sweden. The local industry, as Swedish Film Institute head Anna Croneman said in a recent interview with Göteborgs-Posten, is currently in a financial crisis. Cinema admissions are down significantly and production budgets have been cut. These issues have been compounded by the wave of conservative culture wars that are sweeping Swedish politics, making it harder than ever to produce work in the country, best known for developing esteemed directors like Ingmar Bergman, Roy Andersson, and Ruben Östlund.
Below, Andersson and Abrahamsson speak about some of these wider issues hitting Swedish cinema and how they manage to still carve out a space for their work. They are also joined by Tucker who digs into how she crafted a new portrait of Garbo’s life.
DEADLINE: Lorna, how did this project come about?
LORNA TUCKER: When you work with great producers like Patrik and Jakob, you can do anything, even under the current difficulties in documentary filmmaking. We all know documentaries don’t have the budgets anymore. This project came about when Garbo’s nephew reached out. I was adamant from the start that the only documentaries I wanted to make moving forward were projects where we could explore big life questions and stories that can inspire without being preachy. But when I started to read Garbo’s personal letters, I realized there was something special here, because I understood what she was going through. I could read between the lines of what she was saying and feeling. She came from poverty, and no one knows what that’s like better than I do — the things that drive you and the barriers you put up to protect yourself. After that, the whole piece came together. We decided to make a film about feeling. We wanted to show people how it felt when she was writing the letters. And we wanted to bring it to life through a true cinematic experience.
JAKOB ABRAHAMSSON: The film started with Lorna and Embankment. We came on through my distribution label Nonstop Entertainment. We had heard Lorna was making the film. We had distributed Lorna’s last film about Vivienne Westwood, so we acquired this. But then Embankment asked if we knew someone on the ground in Sweden who could help with the shoot. We did. It was us. So that’s how the collaboration started.
DEADLINE: Jakob and Patrik, this is your first co-production. How did you find that process? Was it difficult to adjust to an international collaboration?
ABRAHAMSSON: I’ve known the Embankment crew for a long time as a distributor. We’ve acquired many films from them, so this was very smooth. We handled the work in Sweden and they took care of the rest. It was an even split.
PATRIK ANDERSSON: On a more general strategic level, at the moment in our landscape of producing, it’s always so enormously important to find partners that share your visions. I’ve worked on lots of different complicated co-productions. You need to be in the same boat. This was a new collaboration for us, which is always interesting. The UK system is very different from our Swedish system. I made Midsommar, which was a film where all the Swedes were working collectively with an overarching U.S. approach in A24 governing from above. That was extremely interesting. I think on this project, it was very even, and everyone knew what they were doing, which was so important. We had such a short amount of time to make it happen.
DEADLINE: Lorna, why did you cast Noomi?
TUCKER: We cast Noomi because we wanted the voice of Garbo to be someone contemporary. We didn’t want to use computer-generated voices. We wanted it to be someone who could understand her struggles. Someone who has also overcome a lot of hardships to find her place. I knew a bit about Noomi and I just felt like she was someone who had overcome so much and since she’s now a big Hollywood player she could relate more so than anyone else.
DEADLINE: Jakob and Patrik, I recently interviewed Göteborg Film Festival head Pia Lundberg who name-checked you two. She spoke about how she hired you at the Stockholm Film Festival as writers for the Festival’s magazine and how you were later poached by the programming team.
ABRAHAMSSON: Yes, that’s true.
ANDERSSON: It’s a great connection and story. It’s all true.
DEADLINE: How do you guys split the work load between Nonstop and Mylla?
ABRAHAMSSON: It varies over the year. I just came from Sundance, which is 100% about acquisitions for NonStop, but seeing a good chunk of the year’s upcoming films also helps a lot in what Patrick and I are trying to do. You get a good indication of what’s happening and you can find inspiration. So I would say maybe 50% Mylla and 50% NonStop. There’s also the cinema that we’re running, Capitol, which is its own organization with a Head of Operations. There are 35 employees in total working there. It’s so comforting to have Patrick as my producing partner. I know that he can handle everything. Connecting it back to the Stockholm Film Festival’s magazine, Patrick and I started in the industry by writing about film but we also came from studying Film History at the University. And before that, we were just film nerds who grew up watching everything in the local video stores. So now, working in several layers of the business, we still need to pinch ourselves sometimes to realize it’s happening.
ANDERSSON: Adding to that, it’s important to note that when producing out of Scandinavian, it can take a long time to get from an idea to building your film, developing financing, and making it happen. The general timeline up here is about five years. So being close to Jacob and the distribution side, you get to tap into the films that will actually have festival runs and work commercially in our market. It’s a great collaboration. Here in Göteborg, we’ve just pitched a new feature film that we’re going to shoot this summer in the city. It’s once again a lovely collaboration. We’re the main producers but we have Finnish co-producers and it’s working smoothly once again. It’s a great project called Blood Suckers. It’s a horror film about a mother that has had enough of her family. We’re making it in the tone of Speak No Evil but it’s very close to Falling Down in structure. We’re on track to shoot this year.
DEADLINE: Where are you with Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Egghead Republic?
ABRAHAMSSON: We haven’t communicated much about it but it’s the story of a Vice magazine crew that enters something that looks like the zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It’s absolutely wild and crazy. Pella and Hugo, the directors, have been handling everything on the film. It’s been in post for a long time because it’s very ambitious and we had very little money to produce it. So it’s finished and you’ll know more this year.
DEADLINE: Jakob and Patrik, before we leave, I want to ask what you both thought about the Swedish culture minister’s controversial statements during her opening speech at Göteborg.
ANDERSSON: It’s a manifestation of the current politics here in Sweden where certain politicians would rather have the markets lead, which is difficult when we’re such a small market in Sweden. So it’s just absurd to hear such things said so openly and aggressively. It’s the talk of the town, to say the least, and everyone is pissed.
ABRAHAMSSON: What Patrick said is unfortunately the state of things. The Swedish industry is not a very prosperous place to be right now. I assume the speech was bait to launch a discussion. The government is trying to put a flag down as a big report they commissioned into the local film industry is set to be published soon. The report will likely say the local industry is underfunded. We have much less money per capita than Denmark, Finland, and other countries in Europe. So I guess the speech was the baith to kickstart a discussion where the government will say they won’t increase funding. That’s my hunch. But it isn’t a very productive start to the discussion.
