Knutte Wester
Born in 1977, he studied at the academy of fine arts in Umeå and Johannesburg. He has exhibited internationally since. His debut film was the documentary GZIM REWIND (2012) followed by short film DAWN IN A CITY WITHOUT NAME who won best Swedish Short at Tempo 2014. In 2015 he won several awards for his artistic work, including the price from ABF and a working grand from the Swedish Artist Grants’ Committee for his work. In 2015 he was Artist in Residence at NARS in New York, working with film project A BASTARD CHILD.

Director's statement
"As I child I used to sit in my grandmother kitchen and she told me stories about her childhood. Stories about growing up unwanted and rejected, stories of an undemocratic and intolerant society I realized in some ways still were present. I heard her voice and I imagined the scenes at the orphanage and the frozen lake in my mind. I have spent years trying to visualize those scenes and create that film that once happened inside my head. I painted every frame, trying to give the story a body, but trying to keep that sense of a memory [...]. My Grandmother stories terrified me, but they also became tools or metaphors I used in trying to understand things. I can still smell the ice in the frozen harbor, where she and her mother went looking for a hole in the ice".