Citizen X sold to TV in the US and more

Back in 2007, a friend of mine challenged me to put together a simple story for a short film that we could shoot over the weekend with friends in cast and crew positions. It was just a few months after wrapping film school in Paris, and I was trying to figure out how to get into the film business her in Norway – simply put, it was not the best of times in my life and the challenge came as a welcome breather. We decided to update a short script I was initially planning to shoot in Paris the year before, but that was cancelled due to heavy preproduction on my end of studies-film. The script was neither especially original and certainly not very “me”, but it was fun, simple and just what we were looking for.

A couple of days later the cast and crew were in place. We had secured a good deal for equipment and cool locations, and even convinced Kodak to provide us with free film stock. The day after we started shooting and three days later we sent the cans off to the lab in Copenhagen. Editing and sound mixing were done in a week with some finishing touches applied later on, but all in all the whole production of Citizen X took a mere two weeks. After that we had no plans for the film, as this was initially meant to be mostly for the fun of it. But people liked the film and convinced me to send it to festivals, and so I did. A year later the film had screened in more than 25 of them, all around the world from Lima and Athens to Madrid and New York. It was also screened in our two Norwegian short film festivals – Minimalen and Grimstad. It was always with mixed feelings, as I never felt this film was representative of what I wanted to do as a filmmaker, but at the same time it was great fun. Two years later I still get e-mails from festivals wanting to screen the film, having seen parts of it at YouTube or in the market archives at Clermont-Ferrand and Cannes. It truly lives a life of its’ own these days.

American posters

The only thing I really wanted to push for, was to sell the film to television. Quite simply because with a running time of less than 7 minutes and being (if anything) an energetic little thing, I felt it had some potential. I’ve been sending screening copies of it to channels for a while now. The first to pick it up was television in Portugal, then a few countries in Latin-America came along. And today I’ve been offered to sell it to US and Canadian cable channels, where it will be screened in a retrospective program of European shorts from the last decade. My main goal now is to sell it to France, Germany and Spain, hopefully securing a deal before March. Here’s the film’s opening sequence: