Alice hasn’t seen her two children in months. After a recent and difficult divorce, her ex-husband keeps them from seeing her, awaiting the final custody verdict in Northern Sweden. When her son calls her in the middle of the night weeping helplessly, Alice takes action. She travels on the night train to the North and in a last desperate attempt to win them over, she abducts the children and ventures on an illicit charter trip to the Canary Islands. With the idea that the distance between the frozen Northern Sweden and the Canaries could buy her just enough time to reconnect with her children and possibly change the verdict on the custody case. But before she knows it, she is wanted for kidnapping, and both the authorities and her ex-husband are chasing after her.

CHARTER is a personal story, as are all my films. I come from a family with generations of divorced parents actually. So, I guess I grew up having to deal with that and thinking about the complexity in that, the loyalty, responsibility, power. Now I’ve been thinking about this for many years and I wanted to make a movie that is a love letter/declaration of love to divorced parents. I think I make films about my worst nightmares, what I’m afraid of, and one of those things is definitely that you can lose your children. I was wondering how far you would go for your children if you were in a custody case and about to lose them. How far should you and could you go? And is there a point where you should let go? Stop fighting for being with them? Is that ever okay? Especially for a mother, a woman? Or is that a betrayal? Do you always have to sacrifice yourself completely for your children as a mother?

Amanda Kernell was born in 1986 in Umeå in Northern Sweden with a Sami father and a Swedish mother. She is a trained Director of The National Film School of Denmark and their 4-year directing program and has since 2006 made several award-winning short films as a writer/director such as NORTHERN GREAT MOUNTAIN, which had its world premiere at Sundance 2015 and has won awards as Best Swedish Short Film at both Uppsala Short Film Festival and Gothenburg Film Festival 2015 and was nominated for the Swedish Academy Award “Guldbaggen”.
Before film school Amanda studied Scriptwriting at The Nordic Author School Biskops-Arnö and Filmpool Nord’s course “Writing low-budget feature film”.
Her feature film SAMI BLOOD (2016) premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2016 and won the Europa Cinemas Label for best European film. It was sold to over 70 countries. CHARTER is Amanda's second feature film.

FILMOGRAPHY:
2020 CHARTER
2017 I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU CONNY, short
2016 Sami Blood (Feature)
2015 NORTHERN GREAT MOUNTAIN, short
2014 EUTOPIA, short
2013 THE ASSOCIATION OF JOY, short
2010 THIS MEANS FOREVER, shorthis means forever (Short)
2009 SHARING ALL, short
2009 SPEL, short