Yrsa Roca Fannberg: The Ground Beneath Our Feet

“I love hands, and I can’t wait for my hands to get old and have the veins out. I keep saying that hands are fascinating. It is something so tactile, so easy to hold someone’s hand to stroke their hand. It’s something you constantly do. In residence, people often need less medicine and more human contact. There is also something about the skin, which has lived a lot. It’s very photographical as it’s like a landscape. It’s like a creek coming down the mountain. The whole skin becomes like a mountain that has been there forever. The skin is like a landscape…”

Beautiful sentences from the director of the masterpiece I saw yesterday in the cinema Spegeln in Malmø, part of the competition programme of Nordisk Panorama. Yrsa Roca Fannberg hired Wojciech Staron to do the camera, the Polish director and cameraperson behind many many documentaries; to mention just one, “Brothers”, which is also a close up of old age as the film of Fannberg is. Staron interprets perfectly the intentions of the director making a warm-hearted visual poem from the homes of the old people in what Fannberg shows are within an institution. The film is a poem AND the protagonists recite poems in the film all related to the beauty of life. And love. There are some unique sequences with couples, one of them more fragile than the other, caressing, caring. It is a very intense film thanks to great editing that give you space to breathe after, yes, breathtaking sequences.

I met the director after the screening and she told me that she is working at Grund, the name of the place, as a nurse. It explains – based on the cinematic skills of the director – why everything in the film looks so natural and that you sense the presence of the filmmaker and her cameraperson. Why there is a flow from one protagonist to the next. Why there are so many fine storytelling solutions like the one towards the end where – shown as “archive” – protagonists are there a bit earlier in their life.

I wonder what young people think of the film. For someone close to 80 the film of course content-wise thoughts: A BIG THANK YOU!

Iceland, Poland, 2025, 82 mins.

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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