A girl walks up the stairs to her apartment with her shopping bags. He stops midway through and takes out the phone. “Whenever you go shopping, go up the stairs and avoid the elevators, so you can burn more calories“he says to the camera and his 600,000 followers. The invasion of notifications begins: likes, comments, private messages. When he gets home he prepares a protein shake. He takes out the phone again and records the whole process. Phone, phone and more phone, and so on to infinity at all times of your routine.
The first idea that one can extract by seeing Sweat is that it is a film about a empty woman that has been lost in the vast universe of social networks. The protagonist, Sylvia, is an influencer fitness who is dedicated to giving motivational speeches and to share healthy advice on their social networks. He is a media star in Poland and her followers, among the most loyal and committed there are, raise and support her as if she were a guru with supernatural powers.
Sylwia has everything except the most important: love. For this reason, despite the fame and the money, she feels lonely and hurt. In front of the camera he smiles; looking in the mirror in your bathroom, try to understand who is behind those ocean blue eyes. Part of the magnetism of this character is due to Magdalena Koleśnik, the leading actress, and its director, Magnus von Horn. It follows from his words that many have misinterpreted Sweat as a criticism of social networks, when it is just the opposite: an approach, an observation that does not try to judge the influencers, but expose them in all their nakedness psychological.
“We did not seek to judge”
Magdalena Dude He is a close and smiling person. A priori it seems the antithesis of the character airtight that embodies in Sweat. From an armchair of the Cinema Ambassadors from Madrid and after a mask that only allows him to show blue eyes, that blue so characteristic of the Slavs, he answers us in perfect English. «We did not seek to judge the character. I personally would not want to. We just wanted to show your story, be close to you, and have your experience live on in our imagination.».
Magnus von Horn he also bets on that same idea. Not always movie stars and creators agree with the vision of the characters, but in this case the harmony is more than evident. This young Swedish-Polish filmmaker understands the phenomenon of social networks well and confesses that he never wanted to make a dystopian portrait of the character. «Living in a dystopia or utopia or any ‘opia’ is a personal decision», Considers Von Horn, who clarifies that his main objective was to make a portrait as close and realistic as possible to the influencer’s life.
Swedish filmmaker Magnus von Horn (l) and Polish actress Magdalena Kolesnik attend the preview of the film ‘Sweat’ at the Ambassadors Cinemas in Madrid, on May 17, 2021 / Getty Images / Juan Naharro Gimenez
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Sweat He talks about how new technologies can be a form of expression of emotions, although sometimes it can be futile for us. «Sometimes I can’t express my deepest feelings and I do it through the cinema, or writing and talking about movies. She does it through social media“Explains Von Horn, who believes that viewers will be able to look at Sylwvia with more empathy at the end of the film, just as he did with the influencer who inspired him to create this story.
Magdalena Dude: promise of European cinema
However, the entire weight of the film falls on the shoulders of young Magda (she allows me to call her that). He had never starred in a feature film and he took this role as a personal challenge that has changed his life on several levels. On the one hand, because it has forced you to open an account Instagram, since she is the antithesis of her character: «It was a requirement of the producer and Magnus to prepare the role, so I opened an account and started uploading posts, but it is not my natural field», Explain. «I am a responsible and creative person, so it was a great challenge to have all this responsibility».
When he reflects on some of the most difficult moments of the shoot, tears of emotion come to his eyes. “Perhaps the last scene, the one on television, was the most difficult and the most beautiful” (LOS40 exclusively offers you a clip with this great moment that you can see just below).
«It was difficult because until the end we did not finalize the lines that I would say in that sequence. It was crucial that we be guided by intuition. And in the end were my words. My dream was to say that I was tired of pretending to be better than I really am. I wanted to gather the strength to personally admit it and allow myself to be vulnerable, because being vulnerable is something that makes me panic.. We shot all of this on a real television set where our team members played themselves. There was a circle of people who were connected to me and what I was doing and I could feel that we were so united that it was my responsibility to find that inner strength to convey everything that had to be told. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life», Reports Dude.
«It is a moment in which [Sylwia] feels a deep connection with herself; It is a golden moment, and it is like this when she connects in a more real way with herself and can become the best coach of fitness of the world; his best version, ”says the director, dismissing that this moment serves as a catharsis or long-term transformation. “I think his life changes for a moment, but then he goes back to his routine. She will look for other moments like that, but I don’t think it’s something that will change her. He will go home and think about what has happened and get on with his life.
Sweat The May 21, 2021.
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