Mascha Halberstad's charming debut feature — opening the Generation Kplus competition — follows a young girl given a pet piglet by her grandfather.
Having directed various animated short films and even the video for The Prodigy’s track “Wild Frontier,” it was following the festival success of her 2013 shortthat Halberstad was urged to make the leap to features . So, inspired by a love of Roald Dahl she went into a children’s bookshop near her home in Arnhem in East Holland and said “I want to make a feature film, but it has to be a Roald Dahl kind of book.
Halberstad readily admits that there may be “too much poop” for the palettes of some kids film or TV producers, but says her and Slot made the decision that they weren’t going to “make any concessions and would just do what we wanted to do — if it’s not going to be commercial, we don’t care!” Creating the poop required some careful thought, with the substance needing to fix to surfaces. Eventually, Halberstad and her team settled on a type of sticky silicon, with her keen to note that no poop — or anything for that matter — was added in post-production. “It was important that everything was done on camera — I didn’t want to use green screen,” she explains.
Sadly, for anyone hoping that the King Sausage contest was real and had already begun planning holidays in Arnhem, Halberstad points out that it’s actually a work of fiction. However, she’s using the competition for a short prequel to, due to go into production soon, that will tell the love story of Babs’ parents, dating back to the very first King Sausage contest 25 years earlier.
“The whole world is just so nice to work with,” she says of returning to her miniature sets. “And we’re also trying to develop a series just with the pig.”, Halberstad accepts that the rights have been scooped up by Netflix when it bought the Roald Dahl Story Company last year. But she’s not giving up hope. “I’m writing a job application!” she says.
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