This is a small scale project so this page has not been translated professionally, but using google translate. If you feel the language is incomprehensible please choose the original language (english) above. If your questions are not answered here please send us a mail.
About the movie
A middle-aged lady on a holiday in the sun tries to make new friends and have a good time.
Johannes Nyholm, the director of "Las Palmas", describes the process of making it:
I was on father's leave, and planned to make an unpretentious documentary of my little daughter, Helmi. I was fascinated by her energy - could sit there, speechless, just watching her. The film should be shot in just one day, showing her eating, sleeping, moving around. Then the project grew...
Las Palmas was shot during half a year in my small studio in Gothenburg, Sweden. We built puppets, created small scale sets and ordered miniature beer bottles from Peru on Ebay. Most important during the shoot was to have fun and do stuff that Helmi enjoyed. The set was built like a playground, using soft material and cushions, so she could move around freely. It should not feel like going to work. We shot for 1-2 hours a week. With no strict script to follow, the story developed from Helmis sudden whims. You could say that I directed by not directing. The shooting had to take its time. And the appearance of the protagonist reflects this. She crawls into the film in the intro, and then she walks out of it. In the initial scenes she has hardly any teeth, in the end plenty. She grew out of her wardrobe and the miniature bottles gradually shrunk in her firm grip.
You can see Helmi, sleep, laugh, cry. And she is so cute and beautiful and bursting with energy. I still see the film as a kind of documentary portraying her second year and her first trembling steps in life.
About the LAUNCH
After it's premiere in Cannes "Las Palmas" turned into an internet phenomenon. With over 15 million views on youtube the trailer for the film ("Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas") was the third most popular trailer of 2011, in serious competition with all the Hollywood blockbusters. It then became a huge hit on the festival circuit, with 100 or so festivals (including Sundance), multiple awards and a teaser shown on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Pretty strange for a small scale indie flick from Sweden.
Together with a making-of documentary, "Las Palmas" is now finally released online.
Was that a real joint? Did she have a licence for the MC? What was the bill? Everyone wondering how "Las Palmas" was made can now relax.
We have a clear vision with this project. We see that short films have a tendency to get lost in the wide range of TV series and feature films. Shorts are not shown on cinemas and are hidden in the TV tableus. They lead a secret life on festivals, but they are not seen or heard of by a lot of people. The way it works with current distribution of shorts makes it hard for the majority of people to find them, other than by accident when zapping the TV channels. Shorts are not big business and does not get a lot of media coverage.
So what do we have here? We have a film that is not any film. A huge number of people have seen the trailer. It is a well known movie. But very few have actually seen the full thing.
We are trying out an alternative distribution method, putting the movie online ourselves, for everyone to watch and download for a small fee. No big distribution company, no big TV network stealing the rights, just do it ourselves methodology.
We are a small independent production company (one person with some assistants and hired crew now and then), with minimal resources. Therefore it is very exciting to see if this plan works, if it is possible for a small scale business to cover the whole chain of a complicated film production, from shoot to distribution.
With the help of the trailer and the buzz from the festivals, we hope this will be a big success and get more circulation than traditional methods.