On the second night of shooting, the candles ran out. Maren Solvik had ordered four thousand of them, hand-dipped beeswax tapers from a chandlery outside Bergen, and her crew had burned through the lot in thirty hours. The producers suggested, gently, that a few hidden LED panels would never be noticed. Solvik sent a van to Bergen instead and shut the set down for a day. It was, her cinematographer said later, the moment everyone understood she was serious.
The Salt Orchard, which premiered to a long standing ovation in the spring and has since been acquired for worldwide release by the independent studio Harrowgate Pictures, is set on a Norwegian fishing island in 1791. It follows a widow, played with ferocious stillness by Clio Varga, who takes over her late husband's salting house and slowly uncovers the debts he left behind. It is a slow film, often very dark, and almost impossible to look away from.
Every interior was lit by flame alone. Solvik and her director of photography, Anselm Kjær, spent eight months testing lenses and sensors in a barn, photographing their own faces by candlelight until they understood how far they could push. They settled on vintage anamorphic glass that gathers extraordinary amounts of light, and on actors who learned to hit their marks by the warmth on their cheeks rather than by tape on the floor.
Darkness as a collaborator
What results is a film in which darkness is an active presence. Faces emerge and recede. Rooms have edges you cannot see. In one remarkable scene, Varga's character counts coins at a table while a single candle gutters beside her, and the flame's small shudders become a kind of heartbeat. Audiences at the premiere reportedly held their breath through the whole sequence. Critics have compared it to the Dutch masters; Solvik prefers to compare it to sitting up late with a sick relative.
Varga, a stage actor from Budapest who was little known outside Hungary before this role, calls the shoot the strangest and happiest of her career. With no bright light to hide behind, she says, every gesture had to become smaller and truer, and she lost the habit of performing for a camera she could barely see. Her work has already drawn serious awards attention. Solvik, characteristically, credits the candles: the flame did half the acting, she says, and Varga did the other, harder half.
Electric light tells you everything at once. A candle tells you one thing at a time, and it makes you wait for the rest. — Maren Solvik
Solvik, forty-four, came to directing late. She trained as a theatre lighting designer in Oslo and spent fifteen years on stage productions, where she learned, she says, that an audience will forgive almost anything except being told what to look at. Her first feature, a modest chamber drama shot in a single apartment, gathered a small and devoted following. The Salt Orchard is her second, and it cost less than the catering budget of an average studio release.
Its success has made her, briefly and to her evident discomfort, one of the most sought-after directors in the business. Agents have called with offers of superhero sequels and prestige limited series, and she has declined all of them. Her next project, she says, will be set in a lighthouse and shot entirely during the polar night. Asked whether she will light it by candle again, she smiles and says the lighthouse will have its own lamp, and that will be enough.
