The YDA Jury Presentation is an Elaborate Parody of Norwegian Cinema

Jun. 25, 2024

Making a creative stab at an entertaining Jury Presentation for the Young Director Award in Cannes has become a Bacon tradition.

Each year since 2018, the Scandinavian production company has gotten young filmmakers to give their interpretation of how to present a ton of names in a non-boring way.

This year, Oslo-based director Henrik Dyb Zwart picks on the baton and does not disappoint. Henrik said:

“Bacon asked me if I had any ideas for a YDA  jury intro film and I just said "Yes, of course", but really had no clue of what to do or what I had just signed up for. Since Bacon is based all over Scandinavia we were chatting about where we could shoot, Stockholm maybe? Copenhagen? In my opinion though, nothing beats late May in Oslo, so when I realized the list of nominations was a whopping 50 names - roughly the word count of a short film - things fell into place. I proposed we make a homage to the quint-essential "Oslo film"; an archetypal movie with a melancholic couple, falling in and out of love in the midnight(ish) sun, only here the dialogue is all jury names. The most famous genre examples are of course Trier's excellent Oslo 31st of August and The Worst Person in the World, but I think pretty much every living Norwegian-based director has made at least one short in the genre (I myself am of course also guilty). The short film festival in Grimstad has a generous supply every year - and they're good! That was also the angle: Let's try and make a proper, real short film as best we can. These kinds of nods are best when they're crafted with as much passion as if they were the real thing - it's funnier that way I think. And much more fun to make.  I wrote a script in Norwegian, with real dialogue. I then converted that to the jury names, jiggled them around for the dialogue to sound real and had Anna and Fredrik make it sound as Norwegian as possible. Axel, the composer, delivered a fantastic score and Mario, our DP, shot it in beautiful classic Scandi low-light in two of the city's iconic parks - just like we would have if it was a normal short film. And I'm pretty happy with how it all came together.”