Camera Magica

A portrait of a deserted fisherman's village in Northern Norway called Børfjord - a place with an incredible personality in the middle of a magnificent Arctic nature. The 12 minute short film was filmed in 70mm Super Panavision, using a specially developed "nature animation" technique. The result is a magic flight in one single shot, along the remains of an internal village road. At the same time a whole year passes by at 50 000 times normal speed! Most of the year, the village of Børfjord lies empty with virgin snow between cold houses. People show up only during a short and hectic summer season. But the cycles of nature go on as they have always done, totally independent of what people might do.

Based on research by Ariane Chemin, this documentary tells the story of how French soldier Félix Mora recruited young Moroccans en masse for the mines of industrial France in the 1960s and 1970s as the French economy was booming. This recruitment led to a new generation of working-class French citizens through immigration.

Slettnes on the island of Sørøya in Finnmark is one of many hundreds of small settlements along the coast that were abandoned in the 1960s and 1970s. Around 1990, the then Statoil (now Equinor) had plans to level the entire place and build a gigantic facility for the onshore landing, processing, and shipping of gas from the Snøhvit field. As part of the preparations, archaeological excavations were carried out, and the archaeologists discovered remains of some of Norway’s oldest settlements — dating back approximately 10,000 years. The film follows the archaeologists and the people who own houses at Slettnes at a time when it was still uncertain whether the demolition plans would be carried out. We also follow processes and pipelines through time-lapse footage and reflect imaginatively on our relationship to time. (Later, the Slettnes project was put on hold, and the gas facility was instead built on Melkøya outside Hammerfest.)

Time-lapsed film from the perspective of a train moving slowly down the railroad tracks.