Tea Lindeburg wrote the TV series “Equinox” for Netflix, as well as the podcast “Equinox 1985” for DR, which was nominated for the Prix Italia 2017. She’s also directed a number of children’s and teen TV series for DR and TV 2 and short films. From 1999-2007 she organized the film festival Cosmic Zoom and from 2009-2010 she worked with the Danish National Broadcasting Company as the host for “DR2 Premiere.” “As in Heaven” is Lindeburg’s feature debut.
“As in Heaven” will premiere at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9. The fest is taking place September 9-18.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
TL: “As in Heaven” is a film about a young girl who is forced to grow up overnight. It’s about hopes being shattered, dreams being crushed in sorrow and despair, and the fragility of life and how it can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye.
But it’s also about finding hope when all seems lost, faith and spirituality, childhood and imagination, and realizing you can’t change your fate or your destiny, but you can do your best to rise and meet it.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
TL: Nine years ago, right after my own son was born, I read this book by an overlooked Danish female author from 1912 and I immediately knew I had to make it into a film. I had never been inside a story told through the women on a farm in 1880s rural Denmark and never with a birth as [a central component]. Every one of us are born through a woman, but we never see anyone tell the stories of births. How can something so natural be such a taboo?
It was also so clear to me that bringing a baby into the world then always meant there was a good chance of death for either the child or the mother — something that we in our part of the world are shielded from today, but in many other places is the everyday [reality] of pregnancies.
This story spoke so honestly to me and it was clear to me that this story had to be experienced through the eyes of a little girl — a little girl gazing into an unknown, harsh grown-up world with innocent eyes.
W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film?
TL: I am not interested in giving people any conclusions or answers because I don’t have them. What I hope is that it opens up questions and thoughts about people’s own lives. Thoughts about how fragile life is. How lucky we are in this part of the world. How hard it is to be a human. And that sorrow and grief are a part of life and that all we can do is keep on living and make the best of what we have.
And also that being a woman is some crazy shit.
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
TL: The biggest challenge was for sure that we shot the film on 16mm, in five weeks, and on a small budget with 10 children, animals, and elders. We were depicting the 1880s and were very weather dependent — it all takes place over 24 hours — during a pandemic.
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
TL: In Denmark we have an institute for film, funded by the government, where commissioning editors evaluate and fund films. I was very lucky that one of the commissioning editors understood my film and my vision. Besides that, it was funded by the production company, a local film fund where we shot, the distributor, and the Danish Broadcasting Association. Everyone worked for minimum wage and some of us invested our salary. It was a real labor of love.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
TL: As a child I always played make believe games with my friends. Coming home from school I would use the time on the bus to orchestrate and imagine the games I was about to play — the characters, the storyline, the turn of events that would unfold.
My parents bought a video camera when I was nine and I started making little stop-motion films with my friends. I told the other kids what to do and decided on the story, but I had no idea that that was what it meant to be a director.
As a teenager, I discovered art films and then there was no way back. I disappeared into the world of Bergman, Truffaut, Kieślowski, and Polanski and I knew this was where I belonged. Their movies were magic to me. And imagine if I could do magic too?
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
TL: The best advice I have received was from my parents. It wasn’t a single piece of advice, but more a way of raising me: to trust my intuition, work really hard, and follow my dreams. My father had a saying, “If you don’t know where you are going you might end up somewhere else,” which is corny and funny, but also true in a basic way. I have always known my direction, just never exactly the route to get there.
The worst advice I have received has all been from older women in the film business, and it wasn’t really “advice” — I was being told, “just stop.” There has unfortunately been a sad tendency of women not supporting women in the film industry, but I have a feeling this may have changed. A female director that I admired was once appointed commissioning editor of a small grant in Denmark and she called me in for a meeting when I was young. She told me how she had been watching and following my work for some time, but she hadn’t invited me to the meeting to grant me money but to scold me — because I was such a superficial artist, and I should just stop because I had nothing [in my heart to say]. I was quite devastated and had I been a bit more fragile I might have stopped right there.
W&H: What advice do you have for other women directors?
TL: If you can choose another job, by all means do it! Being a director/artist is hard on your soul! But if you can’t, if you have a need inside of you to tell stories and you know with your heart this is all you want to do, then there is no way around it. Then you just keep going! Keep working and pushing. Read a lot. Watch a lot of movies. And write! Trust your own intuition and your own stories. Don’t let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do. Don’t take no for an answer. No one is going to serve you anything on a platter — not even a rusty copper one. Your first film is 85 percent perseverance, 10 percent talent, and five percent luck. And the luck will only come your way if you persevere. This goes for women, men, and nonbinary directors alike!
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
TL: I love “Cléo from 5 to 7” by Agnès Varda. I actually love all her movies, but this was the first one I watched. I was in my early 20s and I was taken away by its beauty, but not just that: here was a film that captivated me even though nothing really happens. It is a wait for a call from a doctor, but a wait that’s triggered by an [ominous] looking set of tarot cards in color. The rest of the film is in black and white.
It is a wait that takes us through normal, everyday situations with a young woman in Paris in the ’60s. She buys a hat, she meets her lover, she plays music. But because of the wait for the call, it seems like everything she is experiencing is through a new set of eyes. The everyday situations are tinted with hope and fear and a new awareness — as if she is experiencing the world for the first time. There is a naivety and a curiousness in the way it is told. And also a playfulness with the media in itself.
When I first watched this film I felt seen. I understood that films could also portray something just pure and beautiful and unsettling. I couldn’t understand why this film attracted me so much, so I have kept coming back to it. And I’m still looking for the answer.
W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?
TL: I have been so lucky that I have been working all the way through the pandemic. When COVID hit in March 2020 we were in the middle of shooting the Netflix show I created, “Equinox.” We paused it for almost three months while I rewrote scenes that either involved traveling, many extras, or elders. During this time, “As in Heaven” was greenlit and we shot it in August and September.
I live in New York with my family, so I was one of the few who actually travelled continuously throughout the pandemic, which was a very surreal experience with empty planes and airports.
W&H: The film industry has a long history of underrepresenting people of color onscreen and behind the scenes and reinforcing — and creating — negative stereotypes. What actions do you think need to be taken to make it more inclusive?
TL: In Sweden they decided some years ago that they would equally fund the same amount of female and male directors. There was talk of doing the same in Denmark, and in the beginning I believed this to be an almost degrading approach because I didn’t want to be funded just for being a woman: I wanted to be funded for being equally as talented as a man! But as time passed so did my beliefs — because one doesn’t exclude the other. Had it not been for the newly appointed film commissioning editor Silje Riise Næss at the Danish Film Institute who actively, by herself, decided to fund more women, my film would probably never have been made.
I believe that the film industry actively needs to choose to fund underrepresented people because what we need is a shift of mentality. The more we as an audience get used to seeing leading female characters or characters of color and to experience the visions of underrepresented artists, the more the audience will open up to these kind of stories and the more it will inspire future filmmakers who are outside of the norm to follow in their footsteps. Having the underrepresented telling their own stories will also eliminate negative stereotypes onscreen — who tells stereotypical stories about their own?
