Birdhouse

14 year old Hannah is reluctantly taking part on family weekend at her mothers friend Sally. When they arrive it is easy for Sally to see that Hannah cannot stand her stepfather Andreas and is accusing him of killing her dog. Andreas is certain that there is something wrong with the girl and hopes that Sally will convince her insecure mother to take action on her. While the adults talk, Hannah wonders deeper in to the woods trying to escape the pressure from her family. There she is befriended by the charismatic but mysterious Elijah – he’s older than her, wild and probably dangerous. And he’s prompting Hannah to stand up against Andreas. As his influence over Hannah grows and her relationship with her step-dad deteriorates, events by the lake take a decidedly sinister turn…

Birdhouse is a disturbing psychological thriller in a modern family setting. It tells a story of a fight between a daughter and a stepfather through accusations, illusions and lies. Everything starts with a shady story of dead dog, and layer by layer we learn some unexpected truths and a dark secret in the core of the family.

BIRDHOUSE, 24min, NFTS 2014
Director: Pekka Saari, Producer: Franzisca Lindner
Written by: Pekka Saari, Islay Bell-Webb

Reviews

Asko Alanen’s review of Birdhouse on his popular film diary page. Read the review in full here.

Reminisce

Birdhouse got started when me and my producer Franzisca found out that we both wanted to do a film about something properly evil. We started searching murky stories from violent serial killers, abuse and mental illness. What intrigued us besides the theme of evilness, was peoples willingness to judge other people without knowing the facts. We were also intrigued about the false security we feel when we think we know the people around us.

Making a thriller in under 30 minute short film is not easy. Plot easily highjacks the show from the characters. This was the balancing act that I tried to tackle with my co-writer Isla Bell-Webb. We ended up using all the space on the page carefully, knowing that we could not use extra lines for anything unnecessary. Our writing process was that after every draft I did, we had a chat and then Islay wrote her own. Like that we were going back and forth, deleting, adding and changing each others work. This got us results and whole writing proccess took just a bit over a month.

In casting we were about to see lot of really young actors which was new to me. One of the main worries in making any film is finding a great lead. And our lead had to at least look like a 14 year old girl. My casting director Amanda Tabak did a thoroughly great job in finding us some real good candidates and we were able to find our leading lady Grace Hogg-Robinson from the very first casting session. I was also very happy when seasoned actor Mark Aiken decided to join our production bringing some experience to the preformance team.

After lot of wheeling and dealing, scouting locations and scimming the budget we headed towards beautiful natural park Snowdonia in Wales. Shoot was, as always, a hectic period of hammering scenes in slate by slate. We had a pretty amazing adventure, which was full of all kinds of ups and downs. We had sheeps on soundtrack, dingies on shots, camera in the lake, moth in the ear canal and all other kind of obstacles. It was stressful, but it was also lot of fun. Cinematographer Tristan Chenais had brought his French camera crew with him to our already international punch of filmmakers, or “the perfect euro pudding” as producer Franziska affectionately called us. To completely loose the connection to the ordinary life some of us were actually sleeping at the main shooting location, which I thought was pretty cool way of making a film, because you never had to go out of the world of the film.

Post production was tough as always, and the real devil with this film was, yes, in the details. All the big parts were functioning quite easily how we intended, but to find the exact tone and needed precision gave us lot of work. The whole post team worked and worked and worked, till we had it settled. There are 2 scenes, 20 cues of music, alternative color grade and lot of sound that never made it to the final cut, but that’s what is sometimes needed to get it right.

We were happy to release Birdhouse on NFTS grad show 2014. It is currently on festival circuit