Interview with Brigitta Kontros

Synopsis: One day Susan suddenly finds herself disconnected from the internet, and can't reach TÖLVA, the artificial intelligence that serves as her digital butler and fortune teller. Lost and confused, she embarks on a journey to find out what happened and how she can reconnect. Along the way, she encounters a series of strange digital phenomena, including filter bubbles, projected VR dogs and the Tinfoil Hats burning computers. Borrowing from medieval imagery with its peculiar mixture of doom and joviality, TÖLVA is exploring the complexities of technology and its impact in our lives.

IAG: The hyper-technification of our world is something that I think we’re all increasingly concerned about. What was the sequence of events that led to you creating a film about it?

BK: For me as a filmmaker, first of all, it was the frustration of the accelerating change of technology that made brand new film equipment feel obsolete in a couple of years, everything from cameras, editing tools, and film formats. I started filming in the mini DV era and recall my parents using film to take photos. Now we can film with our phones, everything we do is more and more computer-based and AI is accelerating this process. Also a couple of years ago, I  started to work as a teacher in a high school and have seen how kids and teens as "digital natives" interact with computers and how much "noise" they are used to. For me, growing up in the 1990s I can remember a time before and after the internet, so this change is mind-blowing. But It is also sometimes hard to grasp and understand as this digital-online-AI world is happening right now, right in front of our eyes, at an extremely rapid pace. And it is interesting to see how this changes our interaction with other people and also on a larger scale, in terms of how we act politically and what we believe in or distrust.

IAG: In looking over the notes I made while watching your film for the first time, I wrote: “If Luis Buñuel were transported to 2026, took acid, and made a stop-motion art film, this is maybe what it would look like.” Where did you come up with the idea for the aesthetic and creative approach of this film?

BK: Initially,  I had an idea of making a hand-printed calendar inspired by Renaissance and late Medieval woodcut prints. But instead of images depicting people weaving or harvesting, I would use images involving modern technology and computers. In this way, I wanted to highlight technology and our digital world, juxtaposing it with the slow, handmade craft of wood print. After a while, the idea of the calendar transformed into the idea of making a stop-motion film. The setting of the film is a Medieval-futuristic mix, merging Medieval elements like the setting and the clothes of the characters with "futuristic" elements such as computer screens and Segways. Another source of inspiration was silent films such as The Witch and The Passion of Joan of Arc, which both use medieval settings to talk about universal problems.

IAG: Technically, how did you make it?

BK: Ultimately, the film was made from a collage of cut-out and woodcut figures animated in stop-motion technique at 24 frames per second. I also wanted to use a glowing texture and decided to incorporate white spray paint on black to get that effect. I have a background in documentary film and printmaking, so the process of animation was new to me, and I did not plan every shot as meticulously as I should.  In addition, the DSLR camera that I took the photos with didn't have a built-in charger, so I had to change batteries in the middle of almost every scene. That was always nerve-wracking as a little camera movement would ruin the framing of the shot. It took a long time to complete the film. Things that were brand new when I started--like segways--are almost out of fashion, and the large language model AIs that I had only read about are now everyday tools.

IAG: Going back to the subject matter of this film, how do you think we—as humans—can hold on to our human-ness despite the seemingly inevitable march toward greater and greater influence of technology in our lives? Do you think this is something we should resist, or should we simply accept it as the direction of human evolution?

BK: It is part of human evolution, but it depends on how we use the technology. It may be a utopian fantasy to hand over large problem-solving tasks to AI to solve conflicts or to find solutions to climate change. And if we go back to the present day, I am still concerned that technology is developing so rapidly, and we sometimes don't know how to use it so that it benefits us in the best way. On a personal psychological level, there is a sense of feeling overwhelmed and flooded by information in all kinds of formats like tweets, memes, clips, and so there's no wonder why so many of us have stress-related diseases or feel burned-out and overwhelmed--or simply just have FOMO. On a social level, we get increasingly polarized, and the sense of mutual distrust grows. Can we trust the media? Is it fake? Who is the sender of this message? What happens with society if we deeply distrust everything we hear and see? At the end of the day, it is always a question of who is in power of technology/media. Should tech be regulated by governments? Should it be owned by corporations in Silicon Valley? Should it be totally de-regulated?

IAG: Lastly, what are three films or filmmakers that have strongly influenced your work? 

BK: One is the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor. Dreyer. I love the expression of the faces in this film--as if every face has a story carved into it. That has been a huge inspiration for the figures I used in TÖLVA. I had to give a built-in expression to each figure because many of them are static and do not move. Another inspiration is  Yuri Norstein's cut-out animation Hedgehog in the Fog. I am very impressed by the analog animation technique and layers that he used. Lastly, Harry Smith´s playful Mirror animations with those black backgrounds. Why use a white background when black is so much more impactful!?