01/04/2016 - After casting films by other people, Wik eventually got around to making her own feature, which is being produced by the company she started with Marie Kjellson

After serving as casting director on numerous Swedish films, most recently Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Roy Andersson
film profile] and Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ruben Östlund
film profile] (both 2014), Swedish director Katja Wik has now cast her own feature debut, The Ex-Wife [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which is currently in post-production for Kjellson & Wik, the Göteborg-based company she started in 2012 with her colleague, Swedish producer Marie Kjellson.

After one short, the award-winning Victim-Mentality Rhetoric in 2013, Wik also wrote the script for and is editing The Ex-Wife, which follows three women involved in different relationships: a girlfriend, a married mother of two children, and an ex-wife. Klara has fallen in love, and there's nothing she likes better than hanging around with Jacob; Anna, the mother of two, clocks her husband when he's heating formula milk; and ex-wife Vera cannot let go of her ex-husband.

“The idea for the movie comes from my own observations of women's behaviour in several generations. I wanted to look at the barriers they both consciously and unconsciously create themselves. Why is it that so many find they cannot realise themselves in twosomeness? How is it that so many get stuck in the same pattern? How do you change direction, and how big is their own responsibility?” Wik pondered.

“With humour and seriousness, The Ex-Wife deals with behavioural traits that nobody wants, but which invariably exist – such as being the accommodating girlfriend, the fretful spouse and the brooding ex-wife. It's a film about changing directions,” explained Kjellson, who is producing the film.

Originally an editor on such titles as Swedish director Stefan Jarl's The Girl from Auschwitz, Kjellson was signed up by Swedish director Ruben Östlund's Göteborg-based Plattform Produktion in 2004, later going on to become CEO. She ended up producing his award-winning Force Majeure.

She was joined by Wik, and for eight years they worked together on all of the company's productions, including Force Majeure, which received three Guldbagges, Sweden's national film prize. In 2012, they decided to launch Kjellson & Wik in order to develop their own ideas under their own names with working methods that they were able to control themselves.

At the same time, they started to work on The Ex-Wife, which has a cast including Maria Sundbom, Nina Zanjani, Ellen Olaison, Robin Keller and Karl Linnertorp. The work-in-progress film was selected for Sweden's Göteborg International Film Festival earlier this year, and local distributor TriArt is planning a national release for the autumn.