Review of “I huvudet på en filmskapare” (2019)
Seen in 2019.
A portrait of outsider artist Anders Olofsson, a janitor who lives with his mother and has spent 20 years working on an incoherent feature-length movie as a spin-off of a tiny part he once played as an extra in a studio production. 80 of Sweden’s most famous legitimate actors participate, many of them working for free, putting in a day each.
Olofsson looks the part he’s made for himself. He confesses that what he enjoys is to film the stars. Watching the footage later, he says, is less entertaining. It’s clear that his project is a self-serving fantasy with little sense of responsibility. The actors alternately humour him and treat the project as an industry in-joke, without jeering on screen. It’s certainly less uplifting than Marwencol (2010), but it is wholesome enough. There is a satirical thread as well: The makers of this documentary make sure to show how easily Olofsson recruits his actors in ways orthogonal to filmmaking competence. This attitude is not exclusive to outsider projects. It explains how Three Suns (2004) got made.