BLIND is the directorial debut of Eskil Vogt, the co-writer of Joachim Trier’s acclaimed REPRISE and OSLO, AUGUST 31ST. With his first feature, Eskil created a complex, humorous, and original drama.

After losing her sight, Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) rarely leaves her apartment. She can still remember how the world around her looks, but the images that were once so clear are slowly replaced by darker visions. Ingrid suspects her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) doesn’t always leave for work when he says he does. Is Morten there in the apartment with her? Sneaking around, silently observing her? Or when he claims to be writing e-mails to colleagues, is he actually chatting with his lover online?

Morten’s old college friend Einar (Marius Kolbenstvedt) is an aficionado of film and music. But rather than fostering his passions, he keeps finding himself exploring the world of online porn and spying on Elin (Vera Vitali), a Swedish woman who lives across the street. Elin lost her entire social circle in her divorce. When she starts experiencing absurd, inexplicable events, she is left with no one to talk to but her ten-year-old daughter.

BLIND is a witty and unpredictable drama about how our innermost fantasies and desires affect how we perceive the world around us. With BLIND Eskil Vogt establishes himself as a director with an eye for detail and the deft ability to balance humor and drama through a creative and lively approach.

More than a film about a medical condition, “Blind” is about our inner lives – the beautiful, ugly and sexual thoughts and feelings boiling under the surface in us all, blind or seeing. Blindness seems to lead straight into that inner world. Objective reality looses some of its hold over the imagination, it’s harder to keep thoughts in check.

I wanted the film to be a celebration of creativity, of storytelling, the urge to manipulate in order to create something beautiful, funny, interesting and even touching, our need to invent stories to make sense of the world and our inner turmoil.

At the same time I found blindness gave me a take on the exaggerated importance of the visual in the modern world, how we are bombarded with pictures, our obsessive preoccupation with our image, our desire to see and to be seen and desired.

Since we live in a flood of visual clichés I felt an obligation to try something a little different. To try and pull us out of our viewing habits and see things afresh, to see ourselves and the world we live in in a new and slightly twisted way.

And paradoxically, dealing with blindness, I felt I had the possibility to take advantage of the whole range of cinematic tools. For what is closer to the essence of the art of film than the theme of seeing/not seeing? Light and darkness? To observe or be observed?