PREVIEW : Mark Cousins’s STOCKHOLM MY LOVE
In Mark Cousins’s STOCKHOLM MY LOVE Alva Achebe (Neneh Cherry) is a passionate Swedish architect who is fascinated by the way buildings can influence lives. And yet, she’s haunted by an event from her past. A year earlier, Alva was involved in an accident, the weight of it still affecting her today. On the anniversary of the accident, she reaches breaking point. She gets lost in Stockholm, eventually returning to the scene of her tragedy.
Edinburgh-based Mark Cousins is a film critic / filmmaker best known for the fifteen-hour “THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY” (for which he received a Peabody and a Kubrick award), A STORY OF CHILDREN AND FILM (which ran in the official selection at the Cannes Festival) and THE FIRST MOVIE (Prix Italia). Recently, Cousins waxed poetics about his own personal worldview through a series of film essays that he shot around the globe, including WHAT IS THIS FILM CALLED LOVE? (Mexico City), HERE BE DRAGONS (Albania), LIFE MAY BE (a collaboration with Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari), 6 DESIRES (Sardinia) and I AM BELFAST, about his native city.
Co-written by Cousins with Swedish producer Anita Oxburgh, STOCKHOLM MY LOVE augments Cousins’s essayist style into dramatic and musical form (STOCKHOLM MY LOVE is, for all intents and purposes, a musical), with a soundtrack by three great and contrasting Swedish musicians. Along with five songs sung by Neneh Cherry written specially for the film, STOCKHOLM MY LOVE features tracks by Benny Andersson of ABBA fame with his band the Benny Andersson Orkester and classical music by nineteenth century composer Franz
STOCKHOLM MY LOVE is a Sweden/UK co-production, produced by MIGMA FILM and BOFA PRODUCTIONS with funding from the SWEDISH FILM INSTITUTE, CREATIVE SCOTLAND, BBC FILMS, FILMCAPITAL STOCKHOLM via FILMREGION STOCKHOLM-MALARDALEN and SWEDISH TELEVISION (SVT).
Fortissimo Films, which recently acquired worldwide sales rights (except for Sweden and the U.K.) will be launching STOCKHOLM MY LOVE at Berlin’s EFM with a recently-completed promo reel according to the publicist.