‘Gina’ Director on Telling the Film Through the Eyes of a 9-Year-Old With a Struggling Mother
If you saw Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, starring Vicky Krieps, or Josef Hader’s Wild Mouse, among other films, you have experienced Ulrike Kofler’s work as an editor. But the Austrian creative also works as a writer and director.
After directing and co-writing What We Wanted, starring Lavinia Wilson, Elyas M’Barek, and Anna Unterberger, her second feature as a writer and director is the family drama Gina, which tells the story of a nine-year-old girl, played by Emma Lotta Simmer in her first-ever acting role. Growing up in a household overseen by her young, pregnant and struggling mother, portrayed by Marie-Luise Stockinger (Maria Theresia), she must take care of her two siblings in a home that often has no food on the table and gets regular visits from the child services department.
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Kofler, who has two children, one of them a foster child, shows the world through Gina’s eyes with a focus on how poverty, social problems and trauma are passed on to the next generation while not giving up on the hope that change is possible. The cast also includes Gerti Drassl and Uschi Strauss.
Gina has its U.K. premiere today Friday as part of the Austria country focus at the Glasgow Film Festival, which runs through March 9. The film will also screen on Saturday.
In a conversation with THR‘s Georg Szalai, Kofler discussed this issue of generational poverty, taking audiences inside a child’s point of view, and what’s next for her.
How did you approach Gina and telling it from a perspective we rarely see?
For me, it was very important to tell the story from the perspective of the child. For a long time, I didn’t know if this would be a boy or girl, how many siblings the child would have, and all this developed while I was writing the script. But for me, it was always really important to tell this story through the eyes of the children.
During our preparation, my DOP Robert Oberrainer and I decided to take the camera to the level if the children as often as possible.
How did you find the children, especially your lead Emma?
It was a long casting process, and I had a lot of help from my casting director Rita Waszilovics and children caster Paul Ploberger. We looked at a lot of children, 200 or 300. Emma had nothing to do with film before. She saw a (casting) note in her school and asked her parents to take a quick video on a cell phone. And then she sent it to us and got the role. She’s just great. The two younger brothers are also brothers in real life also, so they grew up together.
What was key to the work with the kids and developing their relationship with the grown-ups?
I told my producers that I would need a long time to prepare for this film. We had a whole summer, and we were always meeting. Sometimes we did some rehearsals, sometimes we just went swimming. And so we grew closer and grew together.
I often get the question if it was very difficult for the children to play these roles. Of course, the film addresses such serious issues as alcohol addiction and poverty. We were discussing these issues a lot but we also had a lot of fun on the set. And Emma has said when she was driving home from the set, she often thought that she was so happy to be in such a good family.
We also had a separate kid script to make it easier for them to understand the story, and we also had two child coaches, Christine Hartenthaler and Paul Ploberger. They were very important and were there the whole time, including during the preparation for the film. So the children had a lot of support. And the parents were also a big support for us. They were on the set often. When I studied film, the teachers always said “don’t get the parents on the set!” I cannot agree. The parents were very helpful for us and the children.
Were there any particularly challenging or difficult scenes?
We had no problems for most of (the shoot). Only one scene was really difficult. It was a scene in which the mother is yelling at Gina. We had a rehearsal with Marie-Louise and Emma, and Emma said “please, don’t yell at me. I can’t take it.” She just couldn’t get the (emotional) distance, it was not possible.
So, in the end we had Marie-Louise (pretending to be) yelling without sound. And in the editing, we added the sound. This was the only situation that was difficult. This is a very important scene, so we had to figure out how to do it because it was too much for Emma.
Your film includes images of shadow and light that feel very symbolic. How do you develop visuals for your films?
I am always working with a mood board. And I always glue the moods onto the scenes in the script. So I have drawings and things like that. And the shadows were intuitively there for me as part of the moods. But afterwards, I thought that the shadows are also a symbol of generations (that throw shadows onto later generations).
Are you working on any new ideas?
I am still editing, including with Marie Kreutzer. And at the moment, I’m just focusing on writing a story about a real-life case of victim blaming.
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