Just Bea (Bare Bea)

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Just Bea
Original title	Bare Bea
Type	Features
Genre	Drama, Youth
Director	Petter Næss
Short summary	16 year-old Bea is in her first year at upper secondary school in Oslo. Active on the school magazine, she falls in love with Daniel, the smartest and most gifted student in the top year, who returns her feelings. There is just one drawback, namely her friend' idea of virginity and first love...
Summary	Bea is 16 and a sophomore in high school. She writes for the school paper and is the last one in her group of friends to lose her virginity. She’s in love with the school’s best looking, most intelligent and coolest senior, Daniel. Then, the miracle of all miracles happens; Bea’s interest in Daniel turns out to be mutual. Suddenly, a new world of social and sexual possibilities are available. But, according to her friends, there’s only one little problem: the fact that when someone is about to lose their virginity, they should never do it with someone their in love with. After all, the first time always goes wrong! This is a problem for Bea until her friend Mia comes up the solution: Anders. Anders wants to become a gardener, is 19, and completely uninteresting. He is therefore, the perfect candidate. Mia arranges for Bea and Anders to meet, but forgets to mention to Anders that his roll as “bed buddy” is to be purely of a practical nature. After a clumsy yet successful get-together, Anders has reason to believe that Bea is genuinely interested in him. But she’s not. She does of course want to be together with Daniel. Or does she? Or does she want something completely different? Like perhaps moving to Canada in order to study at a new school? Petter Næss - director: "When I read Bea for the first time I felt that this was an opportunity for me to make something totally different... this film has a more active camera style, using the camera much more" "What I really liked about Bea was the conflict between what you expect from life, and what you see in commercials, when you’re young and feel life is going to be like this or like that" "The conflict between these ideas and facing up to real life and reality. Bea is a person who has ideas and she has this pre-conceived view about how things are going to be. When she meets her boyfriend and loses her virginity, she has this vision of something wonderful and beautiful, like the knight on a white horse who’s charging in to take her away. So it is about the conflict between that dream and the reality. How I should look? Who I should be? There is always a major conflict between these questions and what you really feel like, what you really want to do. Bea has to go through a lot of that. She does what everybody expects from her, instead of listening to her own voice, though gradually she understands from listening to what other people have to say, that she has to listen to herself." Kaia Foss - actress "The movie is about Bea and her three best friends, and so we tried acting in groups of four girls, to see who fitted together the best" "I went to an open audition almost a year ago and there were about 400, 500 girls there and we were placed into many auditioning rounds. Because the movie is about Bea and her three best friends, we tried acting in groups of four girls, to see who fitted together the best. I think I went to about nine auditions before I got the part, and that’s when I met Petter. It is very easy to talk to him because he listens to what we have to say. He knows that we’re the ones who are sixteen, not him, so he listens to our ideas and if there is something in the script that doesn't make any sense to us, then he says okay, lets re-write it, lets change it because it is supposed to be realistic for teenagers." Marius Johansen Hansen - director of photography "One of the benefits of high definition (HD) is the digital post-production, which we will do using some very nice facilities in Denmark, so we can work with the images in the post-production phase" "A disadvantage of HD are the lenses. We didn’t have a huge range of lenses. So I came up with this adapter, which was from PS-Technik in Germany, I think. That allowed me to use ordinary 35mm-lenses and keep the depth-of-field that you get in 35. We wanted to shoot all the close-ups with really wide-angle lenses, and I wanted the background to be a bit blurred. I was able to achieve this using the adapter and the 35mm-lenses. I think what we are doing is trying not to give it such a glossy and perfect finish. We are trying to get really close to the actors by working with wide-angle lenses and we are also playing with the angles a little bit here and there to make it a bit off-centre. We’re deliberately avoiding making it too beautiful...we are trying to make to make the characters look a little bit more real, and also give a sense of the weird situation the girls are in. So the style of the film is, I guess, a little bit weird." (from Europanet Making of: www.cineuropa.org)
Cast	Kaia Foss (Bea), Kim S. Falck-Jørgensen (Anders), Espen Klouman-Høiner (Daniel), Ida Thurman-Moe (Sara), Maria Brinch (Anniken), Kamilla Grønli Hartvig (Mia)
Screenplay	Johan Bogaeus
D.O.P	Marius Johansen Hansen
Producer	Synnøve Hørsdal
Production company	Maipo Film & TV-produksjon
Country of origin	Norway
Release date (national)	2004-01-23
Release date (international)	2004-02-07
Technical information
Format	35mm
Screen ratio	1:1,85
Colour	Colour
Length in min's	86:29
Length in meters	2366
International sales	Nordisk Film International Sales mail: contact@nordisk.dk
Festival participation	2004 Göteborg Film Festival 2004 Berlin International Film Festival 14 Pluss Competititon 2004 BUFF – 20th International Children and Young People’s Film Festival 2004 Stockholm Film Festival, junior 2004 International Film Festival for Children & Youth, Zlin 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival 2004 Espoo Ciné, Finland 2004 BUSTER Copenhagen International Children's Film Festival 2004 Warsaw International Film Festival 2004 Norwegian Film Festival, Delft 2004 Sevilla Film Festival 2004 Helsinki Children Film Festival 2004 Cardiff Screen Festival 2004 Exground Filmfest, Germany 2004 Childrens Film Festival Cologne 2004 Black Night Film Festival, Tallinn 2005 Bangkok International Film Festival 2005 International Filmweekend Würzburg 2005 Scandinavian House, New York 2005 Film Festival Augsburg 2005 Transilvania International Film Festival 2005 Umbria Film Festival, Italy 2005 Young People's Film Festival, Watershed in Bristol 2005 Young People's Film Festival, Watershed in Bristol 2005 Young People's Film Festival, Watershed in Bristol 2005 Nordic tour in Brazil 2005 Hamptons International Film Festival 2005 A Luminous Century: Celebrating Norwegian Cinema, Lincoln Centre, NY 2008 Nordic Film Week, Sofia, Bulgaria
Prizes received	2004 Norwegian International Film Festival, Haugesund: Amanda for Best Children and Youth Film
URL	http://www.cineuropa.org/making.asp?lang=ing&documentID=35238&treeID=437

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Director biography:
"Just Bea" is Petter Næss' third feature film. His first was the comedy "Absolute Hangover" which won Amanda Awards for Best Male and Female lead in 1999. Petter Næss is also director behind "Elling" which was Oscar nominated in 2000. Otherwise he has primarily busied himself in the world of plays and revues, both as scriptwriter, director and actor. Since 1997 he has been employed as a director at Oslo New Theatre, and was, among other plays, responsible for the critically-acclaimed stage version of "Elling and Kjell Bjarne".