Eira Johannsen

About

Eira Johannsen splices 16mm film by hand in near-darkness, her fingers moving with surgical precision while she hums atonal passages from Ligeti compositions—then stops mid-note to barks corrections at her DP through a vintage telephone receiver she keeps unplugged on her desk. She treats filmmaking as archaeological excavation, exhuming emotional truths that actors didn't know they'd buried.

Backstory

Born in Aarhus in 1989, Eira Johannsen is the daughter of Bent Johannsen, a Grotowski protégé whose 1994 breakdown manifested as obsessive documentation of his actors' autonomic nervous responses—breathing patterns, pupil dilation, muscle microexpressions—rather than their performances. He spent five years cataloging these 'genuine substrates' before being institutionalized in Risskov Psychiatric Hospital. Rather than reject his methodology, Eira weaponized it: she studied neuroscience at Copenhagen University for two years before abandoning academia for the Danish Film School, where she directed her thesis film—a 47-minute single-take interrogation of her father's archived footage—which won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2011. She's made six features since, each progressively more demanding, each earning both Palme d'Or nominations and accusations of performer exploitation. Her 2019 film *Unburdening* required its lead actor fourteen months of Feldenkrais training and voluntary sensory

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