Johanna Pyykkö
Johanna Pyykkö has a bachelor’s degree in film directing from The Norwegian Film School (2016) and has made several award-winning shorts. Her latest short The Manila Lover has been selected for the short film competition of the 58th Semaine de la Critique during Cannes Film Festival (2019). She's also been Joachim Trier's director's assistant on his latest feature Thelma and been in writers’ rooms and worked as episode-writer for several Nordic drama series. One of them being the second season of critically acclaimed tv-series Heimebane (Home Ground - screened at Berlinale TV-series, the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and other Nordic and European channels).
Johanna Pyykkö has a Swedish-Finnish background (a mainly working-class Finnish speaking minority group in Sweden) and now lives and works in Norway.
Her films are often about identity, belonging/alienation, gender and power. She's now developing four features and a tv-series and has received development funding from The Norwegian Film Institute – New Paths’ scholarships for three of her projects: the sci-fi-drama series Year 2098 (to be produced by Nordisk Film Production) and for the features Ebba & The Lover (to be produced by Ape&Bjørn) and Mirrors On Evy. The feature Ebba & The Lover has also received screen development funding from The Norwegian Film Institute and the feature got an Honorable Mention at the Scandinavian Debut pitch competition at The Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund in 2017. Ebba & The Lover has also been chosen for the Focus Pro’ pitch during Cannes Film Festival. Her feature, The Swedish-Finn, is in development with the Sweden-based production company Verket Produktion.
At the Göteborg International Film Festival 2017, Johanna Pyykkö was awarded the Bonnie Scholarship Dragon Award - presented to a filmmaker who has made a special effort. The same year, she was chosen for the FilmLab Norway-program and in 2018, she was selected to participate in the Nordic Film Lab held by the film institutes of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland together with Göteborg International Film Festival. In 2018 she was also chosen for the development program UP arranged by Talent Norge and The Norwegian Film Institute. This year Johanna Pyykkö received The Norwegian Art Council’s one-year filmmaker’s grant and she will take part in Semaine de la Critique’s and Cannes Film Festival’s Next step feature film lab.
