Slow Motions: An Interview with Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen

Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘Slow Motions’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?

In my early twenties, I composed a requiem in memory of my parents, who passed away when I was in my late teens. This two-hour-long piece for orchestra, electronics, and soloists has, in many ways, become the perennial plant from which everything I create continues to grow. Whether I write texts, compose music, or make films, I return to this requiem—picking leaves from it and planting them in new soil.

Over the years, this has led me to different kinds of work. Some have been quiet, personal films—like Pilgrim Postcards (2001), which circles around the attempt to reconstruct a car journey with a former partner, a journey that ended in an accident. Others, like The Day the Clock Just Struck Two (2005) and Micro Sapiens (2016), sought to capture the almost apocalyptic frustration my mother and I both experienced when confronted with regular office work. I’ve also composed music for collaborations, such as the documentary The Making of Memories for the Future by Belgian filmmaker Jimmy Hendrickx.

The requiem also led to my collaboration with Peni Candra Rini. Through my PhD work, I had already started exploring the idea of writing a dissertation on the figural in screenplay development at NTNU in Trondheim, building on my master's studies in film science and film production. Together, Peni and I chose to let the music lead, rather than follow conventional narrative logic. The meditative aspect is essential to our work. I always try to create in a way that resists becoming a discourse that serves as propaganda for my own will or existence.

Perhaps this is what Schopenhauer called the soul of the universe? I sometimes wonder if this is how many films begin—perhaps even Interstellar, which famously started with music long before the filming began.

As for how I learned to make films, it really began with my mother. When I was six or seven, she gave me a film projector from a mail-order catalog. I used it to project images onto whatever I wanted to either bring to life or capture—whether it was the belly of a cow across the fence at my grandmother’s farm or the neighbor’s house with a bald man's head within, in the village where I grew up. Later, she gave me a film camera. She was a painter and an architect, and had also run a photography shop when she was young. She was my first film teacher.

Later on, I studied film, but what has stayed with me is something I probably learned from her: that the process itself can lead the way, if you are willing to listen.

Tell us about ‘Slow Motions’. How do you describe it?

Slow Motions is an experimental film, loosely following the contours of sonata form. It opens with a musical theme that later returns to conclude the film, embracing three loosely connected stories.

At the heart of the film is Peni Candra Rini’s extraordinary voice. Her voice is not just a sound—it is the life force of the film. Once her voice found its place, the stories seemed to fall into place with a peculiar precision, as if they had been waiting all along.

In the first story, someone feels deceived by the universe after years of mistaking the sun’s reflection in an apartment window for the actual sun.

In the second, just as a person opens the door to the dentist’s room, a tooth falls to the floor. The dentist picks it up and says, 'You are good to go.' A melancholic lightness quietly settles in.

In the third, a neighbor secretly watches a woman in the building across the yard, captivated by her magical smile. Trying to imitate the way she carries out the trash, the neighbor senses an irresistible shift—something quietly life-changing.

The film dissolves traditional narrative logic but carries an inner musical rhythm. It invites the viewer to linger and to sense, rather than to understand. Perhaps Slow Motions is a film about slow revelations and the fragile spaces where meaning begins to form, only to dissolve again.

Peni Candra Rini and Øivind Klungseth Zahlsen, taken while recording the score for 'Slow Motions', were captured by Wirid Nugroho Pamungkas

Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.

I was born on January 28th—the same day as filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara. His collaboration with composer Tōru Takemitsu and writer Kōbō Abe, especially in the trilogy Woman in the Dunes, Pitfall, and The Face of Another, remains one of the most beautiful offerings the world has seen.

Their films dissolve the boundaries between sound, story, and physical space. The music breathes within the film, the landscapes carry philosophical weight, and the rhythm unfolds with quiet patience. They taught me that cinema can be a meditation—a place where logic softens, and something more fluid and fragile can emerge.

This is the space I search for in my own work.

Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?

Schedules have never really been my thing. I often find myself quietly working against them—they rarely move at life’s pace. Much of my work is about gently undermining those hidden agendas that tell us how life should unfold.

Perhaps the real question isn’t how to keep a production on schedule, but whether my own lifetime will be long enough to complete the urgencies I care about.

That said, I respect deadlines when collaborating with others. I simply try to make sure that schedules serve the work—not the other way around.

What was the hardest part of making ‘Slow Motions’?

The idea for Slow Motions grew out of Peni Candra Rini’s vocal improvisations. Her voice sparked something—almost like an inner supernova—and from there, the rest of the film simply landed in our hands, as if it had been waiting to be developed.

The process moved with surprising lightness. The music poured out of my fingers in three days, and within a week, the images knew where they wanted to go. At times, I wondered if it was really supposed to be this smooth—whether I had skipped some essential hardship along the way.

But films have their ways of reminding you. An assistant and I traveled across Lombok and Nusa Tenggara, carrying heavy Sony equipment—only to discover that the images captured on my phone often turned out to be the right ones. Post-production also had its demands, especially with the film format I was working with. And just as everything seemed to come together, Apple’s cloud services suddenly stopped syncing my files, quietly stalling the entire process until I managed to piece everything back together.

Maybe the hardest part was learning to trust that some things really do arrive with ease—and others just don’t.

If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?

I’m currently working on the script for a feature film trilogy about my mother, which is also part of my ongoing dissertation on the figural in screenplay writing.

The idea came to me on a flight home from Asia after living there for ten years. Somewhere above the clouds, I realized I had unknowingly copied my mother’s life down to the smallest detail—and that I was about to repeat her final mistake, the one that, in a way, led to her far too early death. I decided I had to change course. The doctoral work I had returned to complete would now serve merely as a landscape for life drawing.

In the first film, we meet a man preparing to move back home, only to realize that this might be the final nail in the coffin for his quiet hope of something else. Early in the story, he meets a young woman who looks exactly like his mother, speaks word for word as she did on her deathbed, and moves just like her. Suddenly, his academic project takes on an entirely different meaning.

The woman convinces him to abandon his dissertation at the worst possible moment—by climbing out the window during his defense. According to her, that’s the only proper beginning for the next part of the story: a road movie about finding freedom in a world that can’t stop talking about freedom, but rarely lives it.