Alexandra Rapaport as Tina, aka ‘Mum’.
“We wanted something that dealt with relations between parents and children, and did so with warmth, humour and seriousness: so many children’s films seem to exist in parallel worlds, where the only adults who appear are stereotypes”
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Novelist Nilsson-Brännström has since written two more stories about the little Swedish-Greek boy, but it was the first two that captured the imagination of the film-makers. “They warm like a stove in the winter darkness, with their compassion, unconventional elation and humour,” enthused a reviewer in the Aftonbladet.
Screenwriter Ulf Stark merged the two books into a single story. “We wanted to produce a contemporary children’s film,” explains Ingvar, “because many of the children’s films made in Sweden are period movies, set in the forties and fifties. We wanted something that dealt with relations between parents and children, and did so with warmth, humour and seriousness: so many children’s films seem to exist in parallel worlds, where the only adults who appear are stereotypes.”
The strength of the film is that, while doing this, it also allows young Tsatsiki to live in his own private world, communing with the only picture he has of his father - the one showing him holding up an octopus he has just caught, which is pinned to the mirror beside the fish-tank in his bedroom - and honing his diving skills at the local swimming pool. But his warm relationship with his mother - played by Alexandra Rapaport, who was also in Berlin this year, as part of the European Shooting Stars 2000 line-up - is equally crucial to the story.
Mum has what Tsatsiki regards as an unsatisfactory relationship with the bass-player in her group. So, when a cop called Göran (Jacob Ericksson) comes into his life by gallantly (if mistakenly) rescuing him from the swimming pool at the start of the film, Tsatsiki is convinced, against all the odds, that Göran is the man for his Mum.
They make a very imperfect couple. He is a straight-laced country boy who likes dance music; she is a punk-haired rock singer. He is obsessively tidy; she is almost pathologically untidy. But Tsatsiki perseveres, even when Göran enters into a brief and improbable romantic relationship with a fire-eater.
The boy’s main aim, though, is to persuade his mother to take him back to the Greek island where she met his father - a goal which he eventually achieves, though with results slightly different from those he had expected.
Because of delays in putting the final financial package together, production didn’t start on the film until October (instead of August) 1998, which meant that the Greek scenes (filmed on Crete) had to be shot first, before the weather changed. This placed a considerable burden on Samuel Haus, since the young actor had not only to begin with some quite difficult diving scenes, but also had to tackle the film’s emotional climax in the very first week of shooting.
You’d never know it, watching the film. Nor would you know that he had never acted in front of a camera before. His selection came as a result of a three-month search by casting director Maggie Widstrand, during which she saw 5,000 children and videotaped 2,500 of them. Haus was spotted in a children’s summer camp (schools in Sweden close for the summer in June, and summer camp is as much a part of the Swedish summer as it is of the North American one) and impressed everyone with his naturalness. He also had the right complexion and hair colour to make his half-Greek background plausible. Even so, it took several more auditions before Ingvar and her director, Ella Lemhagen (whose third feature this is), were convinced he could handle the considerable demands of the role.
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