Mia (Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock) has become accustomed to strange creatures in her work as a docent at the Tallinn Zoo at the start of “Infinite Summer,” hiding the fact that she’s a bit wild herself underneath the organization-mandated beige attire going home to listen to punk music as soon as she gets home. It’s only a few days away from really being let loose as she’s planned for a vacation with her friend Grete (Johanna-Aurelia Rosin), who she swam with on their high school swim team despite their two-year age difference, and Greta’s friend Sarah (Hannah Gross) at an Estonian lakeside retreat where thoughts of the future as a life after high school beckons, but there’s a precious few weeks to relax.
However, Grete’s idea of a getaway is far different than Mia’s when she brings out of VR headset, exclaiming “I want to explore the human universe” as she plunges her friends into more dangerous waters than sit outside their cabin when they begin to sift through potential suitors on a Tinder-like app that brings virtual dates into their living room. Mia’s experience with animals comes in handy as she’s matched up with the sketchy-looking Doctor Mindfulness (Ciaron Davies), whose pseudoscience she sees through instantly as he tries to impress her, but nonetheless she’s pulled an international and perhaps intergalactic web of intrigue as a pair of Interpol detectives want to know more about her encounter with the doctor and that isn’t the only intrusion as the virtual headset allows for her parents to visit any time they want as well, among others.
Since his 2015 debut feature “Crumbs,” writer/director Miguel Llansó has had a healthy skepticism of technology when a survivor of an apocalypse in Ethiopia invested hope in the arrival of a UFO with diminishing returns and his subsequent adventure “Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway” trailed CIA agents tasked with tracking down a computer virus that revealed an entirely different infection that was afflicting humanity. With similar irreverence, the globetrotting filmmaker refashions a familiar tale of a young woman feeling adrift on the cusp of adulthood into one where neither her age or gender matter as people of all ages are adjusting to a new gadget-filled reality where connections, both of wi-fi quality and human, seem difficult to come by and there are false prophets aplenty such as Doctor Mindfulness playing things by ear. All that said, some good things still are made possible by the internet such as the fact that “Infinite Summer” is now available to stream following its festival run that began last year at Fantasia Fest and charmed audiences from Helsinki to Sitges and Llansó kindly took the time to talk about how his own unique background moving across artistic mediums and cultures contributed to such a unique perspective on the world, drawing on the wisdom of the students he teaches for a story about characters of their age and why he didn’t need to look far for the perfect setting for the film.
How did this come about?
The initial idea came in the middle of the pandemic because all my students were connected through social media. We were all grounded at home, and everybody was trying to connect, and I was teaching online, but it was a disaster. And I remember that we wanted the real contact and that made me reflect about these super connectivities hiding somehow this feeling of loneliness, which is paradoxical, right? How can we be so connected and feel so lonely at the same time? That is an illness of our times. So I thought about that and about if technologies were going to produce a more transhuman way of understanding life and since I’m very technophobic, [I decided] I don’t think so. [laughs] But technologies have also [created] many cracks inside the system, so I hope one of the cracks – one of its failures — opens the situation to a more interesting relations. So [the story] comes from that reflection of loneliness among my students.
As I understand it, you actively involved your students in the production from the writing stage all the way through to actually making the movie. What it was like to have them involved?
To be honest, I didn’t want to make a film with all dicks and we’re trying to do a coming-of-age movie, but I’m 46. But when you are 20, 21, it’s a moment you have to change a lot and we want to have these two layers in this post-teenage years — [as adults and teens], so I thought it was essential to involve young people and my students were really willing to spend a summer [on set] and having fun with us rather than going to the beach, so it was great. Considering that the director of photography and myself are 46 now and I imagine the rest were around 21, it was very, very interesting because we had the chance to have fascinating intergenerational conversations about life.
I remember one of these nights, we were finishing shooting and we were chatting until we went to bed and I was looking at the stars and I would say, “How great would it be to go there to the stars?” And all the younger generation [looked and said] “They are just rocks. Now, why do you want to go there?” I saw it differently, it’s not just going to the moon or to the planets, but the poetry of the discovery, and of the non-limitation, and they didn’t find that in space anymore. They found the poetry more in the faces of the people and in the personal relations. So that was, for instance, a very surprising and poetical moment for me, to find out that this idea of the cosmos is not poetical anymore for the young generation.
The international element of this actually seems to connect to that idea when it’s a blend of cultures in your cast. Was that inherent to the idea?
It was from the start because we live in a globalized world and in none of my films, things happen in just one culture. I don’t believe in cultural identity. I live in Estonia [now]. I’m from Spain, and before I was living in Ethiopia, so I think we live in a very open, cosmopolitan world, and in Estonia, not only [native] Estonians live [there], but people come from America and Ireland, and it’s a melting pot where everything happens. That’s the way we cast Hannah Gross, through our American co-producers, Jon [Read] and Allison [Rose Carter], so I have been always open to these ideas.
[In general] I was looking for people that were very natural, very spontaneous. I didn’t care if they have been performing before or not, and when I saw Johanna [Aurelia Rosin, who plays Grete] and Teele [Kaljuvee-O’Brock, who plays Mia], they were very calm and at the same time, honest about the way they see the movie. They were not trying to pretend or exaggerate. They were very true to themselves and to the way they grow up in Estonia.What I didn’t want to do is to make some sort American film in Estonia. I wanted to have the different kind of nuances of this globalized world, so the Estonians, even if they speak in English, they have this mood and this attitude of somebody that is from there.
The other piece of casting I had to ask about was this amazing lake house where the film is set. What was it like to find?
I was invited by my producer Rain Rannu to a writing camp. He gave us the address and said, “Yes, come over for three or four days and we can discuss the movie in the early stages of the screenplay.” And I drove all the way there and I found out he rented that house, so I said, “Great.” And he said, “I didn’t know if you noticed that this is the house of the movie. And I said, “Oh, okay.” No, I didn’t.” I didn’t think about it. But it was perfect. Somehow it brought the mood and it was a great place.
When you have a lot of effects in this, did it affect how you thought about composing shots or how you could move through the environment?
Yes, all my three films are underground independent films, so we always normally have the camera very close to the people at ground level because we don’t have super big gear and also because even if they are science fiction movies, they are very human movies. So the camera should be close to the humans making those portraits, even if we are using some landscape. The camera work is quite simple in that sense, but we were considering also VFX that were psychedelic and at the same time that were doable. We were not doing a Marvel film, so they were contained and organic to that type of landscape.
I’ve heard that you worked with the same special effects team that you worked on on your previous film and I love the technology that’s actually part of the film’s plot is not overly advanced, but at the same time you can take it seriously. How did you decide what it would look like?
I am very technophobic. I normally have a very old mobile phones and I like this retro technology because it gives certain naivety to my films, but besides the naïveté, I like this contrast between this retro naive technology and the real dark effect that the technology is creating. Normally, if you see technology, it’s friendly, full of emoticons and everything, but behind that structure lies a very, very dark way of understanding the world, You make a mistake with a smiley emoticon and you can lose your job. It’s just a fucking smiley emoticon, but it’s not so naive and that’s why I like to use this naïveté.
The visual energy of the film really does seem to speak to a younger generation. Was that in mind as you were constructing this?
But I’m 46, I cannot really speak to younger generations, so what I can do is try to connect with the younger generation with what I lived back in time and what I live now, trying to see what is common to the new generations and create something that is a little bit transgenerational or universal. Everything in this movie is trans — transhuman, transgenerational, transgender. I’m not a fan of a cultural appropriation or gender appropriation or age appropriation, but I think everybody can speak about the other. We are not going to be perfect. We are going to commit some mistakes. I’m not trying to speak for another generation, but I am trying to communicate with them through a movie and trying to listen to what they are trying to tell me. But I’m not trying to make a film for young people. I’m trying to make a film for myself, for the people that I love and hopefully that touches also a younger generation.
It was interesting to hear you say in another interview that you actually have always been less proud of the films you’ve made than your music, but the films are certainly up to snuff. How did you end up making that transition as an artist?
Look, we normally play music that is one minute long or 45 seconds, it’s very fast. I play with my friend Jose for 25 years, and in one minute, a lot of world happens. For that minute, I go to Mars, to Jupiter, and I come back and everything happens. I hear all the details. And when I play my music, people say, “Yeah, what the noise?” But in my mind, it doesn’t sound like noise, it sounds like there is a micro world there with all the beats. So I think I have this desire to imagine worlds and to make them alive through music or through film.
“Infinite Summer” will begin streaming on IndiePix Unlimited on September 26th.