Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann’s grandson, Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, makes his film debut with ‘Armand’

• With this story about the love of parents for their children taken to the extreme, he won the prize for best debut feature at the Cannes Film Festival.

Valladolid, 22 October 2024. The 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI) has hosted in its Official Section the film Armand, by Norwegian director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, who has spoken about the different themes of his work and the tension between the contemporary education system and parents in conflict situations with children: ‘I also worked in a primary school for many years and I am a parent. So I try to say something about how trapped we can sometimes be in our own love for our children, and how far we are willing to go to protect them’, said the filmmaker, grandson of director Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.

The film tells the story of a mother’s sudden visit to her son’s school, who has been accused of hurting a classmate. No one knows exactly what has happened, so the school management summons the parents to discuss the issue, triggering a heated conflict between them: ‘The most interesting thing about the film is that we are in the position of an external actor, so we have the information we are given. We participate in the decision to believe or not to believe, because the film doesn’t give us the answer to what really happened’.

As part of his research process to prepare the film, the director spoke to 60 school headmasters who had experienced this exact situation and received 60 different answers on how to handle it, he added.

The origin of the storyline was a 15-second conversation he overheard between two six-year-olds, and from those 15 seconds, his imagination went to work. ‘This is a film about how we use very small fragments of information to judge other people,’ said Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, who added that he wanted the narrative to be fragmented so that the audience could, based on their own life experience and background, fill in the blanks, with each person having very different interpretations of what happened.

The director wrote the lead role for Renate Reinsve, an actress known for her role in The Worst Person in the World (2021), with whom he worked in 2016 on a short film. The actress is also involved as executive producer of the film: ‘Renate is a great actress and she found a unique way to combine humour and drama in this role. It’s a film made on a single location with very small spaces and what she brought to us I had never seen before; it was a magnificent performance,’ he added.

One of the most peculiar characters in the film that the director wanted to dwell on briefly is the janitor, whom he considers a very typical figure in this type of situation: ‘He’s like the school’s guardian, but he also has his own story. This is a film about predators and we realise that he is the only one who knows what has really happened, but nobody asks him because they don’t trust him’. Regarding his personal experience as a school teacher, he added: ‘I experienced something similar when I worked in school. That’s why I wanted to portray this character with a story in which he is the observer.’

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