Blind 2014

Blind

Blind

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BLIND is a story of a young woman's journey to rediscover herself, her husband, and the life that she once knew.

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About the Blind 💬

BLIND, the directorial debut of Eskil Vogt, is a drama about how our innermost fantasies and desires affect how we perceive the world around us.

After losing her sight, Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) rarely leaves her apartment. She can still remember how the world around her looks, but the images that were once so clear are slowly replaced by darker visions. Ingrid suspects her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) doesn't always leave for work when he says he does. Is Morten there in the apartment with her? Sneaking around, silently observing her? Or when he claims to be writing e-mails to colleagues, is he actually chatting with his lover online?

Determined to maintain her hold on reality, Ingrid begins writing salacious stories for her memories and thoughts to inhabit. It's within these imaginative fabrications that she introduces us to Einar (Marius Kolbenstvedt), Mortens' old college friend. Einar is an film and music aficionado who lonely and when not immersed in the world of online porn, roams the streets of Oslo ogling pretty women. Einar soon finds himself spying on Elin (Vera Vitali), a pretty young single mother who lives across the street whose lost her entire social circle through divorce. Elin then begins experiencing absurd, inexplicable events that seems to be related Ellen's mounting insecurities over her husband's possible infidelities.

• DIRECTOR'S NOTE

Blindness. Is there anything more cinematic, closer to the essence of the art of cinema than the theme of seeing/not seeing? Light and darkness? To observe or be observed?

At the same time, blindness gives us a unique take on the most contemporary of themes: the exaggerated importance of the visual in our modern world, how we are bombarded with pictures, our obsessive preoccupation with our image, our desire to see and to be seen and desired.

In our visual culture, our experiences tend to be tainted by all we have seen - everything is reduced to a cliché before we can experience it for ourselves. In relation to the theme of blindness, it is interesting to note that the tactile, the touch, is much harder to exploit in media. It could be argued that touching someone - and even more importantly: being touched - might be the purest experience left to us, certainly the most intimate. Maybe that is what the characters in this story long for more than anything: a kind caress, a passionate embrace.

Since we live in a constant flood of visual clichés I feel the obligation to make something original and vital. My ambition is no less than to make a truly unique film, a film with a punk attitude, one that might just pull us out of our viewing habits and see things afresh, see ourselves and the world we live in a new and twisted way.

"Blind" is a celebration of storytelling, the urge to manipulate in order to create something beautiful, funny, interesting and touching, our need to invent stories to make sense of the world and of our inner turmoil. It is interesting to note that the first storyteller we know of, Homer, is represented as blind. And that this also was the fate of Jorge Luis Borges.

In "Blind" Ingrid has lost her sight and retreated to a place where she can feel in control, inventing and invents a world where she is all-powerful. But, of course, Ingrid's problems aren't outside of her flat, they are within her, and soon her innermost fears and repressed fantasies take a hold of her fictions.

But in the beginning, we have no idea that Ingrid is pulling the strings. The fact that Einar and Eline later are revealed as more or less fictional doesn't mean they will appear as such from the outset. It is essential that they feel real and believable making us as invested in their fates as we are in Ingrid's. And when the narrator's manipulations become apparent - and I want it to become apparent, to be a game the spectator can participate in - it is crucial that we never lose our compassion and interest. Einar and Eline aren't lifeless marionettes - through the actors' faces and reactions we will feel their very human disorientation every time Ingrid pulls the rug out from under them, see them struggling to adapt to constant changes, sharing our bewilderment about what is going on.

At the same time, we can't help but be entertained by all the surprising situations they are pushed into, to get a perverse enjoyment from seeing how far the blind narrator will go in abusing these poor people. The more we care, as when Eline opens her heart to her daughter telling her she feels like a higher power is out to get her - the more the absurd and dark humor will be apparent. And at the same time it all takes on an added meaning: everything Einar and especially Eline goes through becoming more or less direct expressions of Ingrid's innermost urges and anxieties.

The film will feel refreshingly disrespectful in its treatment of serious and difficult subject matter. But even at the most darkly comic or twisted moments, there will be an undercurrent of real emotion: Einar's crying need for intimacy; Eline's awkward way of hiding her loneliness - and of course Ingrid's inability to cope with her handicap, her fear of becoming a mother (or not) or that Morten will end up abandoning her, leaving her all alone. Losing one's sight is after all a very human and moving tragedy.

Eskil Vogt

Blind Movie Details 🎥

Directed by

Eskil Vogt

Writing Credits

Eskil Vogt

Starring

Ellen Dorrit Petersen

Henrik Rafaelsen

Vera Vitali

Marius Kolbenstvedt

Jacob Young

Music by

Henk Hofstede

Cinematography by

Thimios Bakatakis

Genre: Drama

Countries: Norway, Netherlands

Blind Official Trailer

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