Mindanao Advice

Lately, I’ve been helping my husband, Eldar, prepare some old films he had stored on hard drives. Many of them have never been shown before. He feels the footage has aged well and serves as a sweet time capsule.

The first project he asked for help with was a music video featuring the artist Ulf M in Stamsund. After seeing it for the first time, I became deeply curious. Who is this man, singing so beautifully and painting images like nothing I’ve ever seen?

Eldar tends to focus more on the small challenges and joys of the present moment, so you always have to ask if you want to hear about his past. For example, I only recently discovered his significance as a filmmaker in Norway during the 1970s—information you can read more about here.

I also didn’t know he had a lot of unpublished video material stored in a basement in Oslo. In 2022, during a visit, he copied some of it over to his laptop and has now decided to release parts of it.

Over the past six months, he has undergone cancer treatment, which he is now in the final stages of.

Feeling hopeful that he will make a full recovery, Eldar has found new inspiration to share more of his creative work, using our blog as a platform. Though we started the blog in 2014, it has been mostly dormant in recent years.

With his strong visual sensibility, he began experimenting with AI-generated imagery while also expressing his growing concern about the state of the world. After writing an article on Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, he used a drawing by his father, the caricaturist Odd Einarson, as the starting point for a series of articles on what the world desperately needs to change for the better. He created featured images with the help of AI and also made art-like visuals. You can read more about that here.

One thing led to another, and he decided to share some of the films he has made over the years that have never been shown publicly. The first is part of a pilot sketch originally intended for Chinese television, featuring a vibrant Chinese dancer named Nancy visiting the theater festival in Stamsund in 2008, where she interviews both Nils Gaup and Ulf M. You can watch it at the end of the article about the GaffGaff Galleri.

As part of this process, the idea also emerged to write two articles about Ulf M and finally release the film Eldar made of him almost twenty years ago.

The first article will be published here soon. It will include the music video Dingy Café, to which I’ve just added English subtitles.

Part two will follow a week later, featuring a 22-minute film titled An Outsider in Stamsund.

Ulf M has a natural talent for both singing and acting, while also painting in a wildly colorful, eccentric style that is entirely his own.

Eldar says this about his art:
“At the heart of Ulf M’s work lies a sense of intoxication—not only in the sensual sense, but also in the emotional realm of human relationships, identity, travel, and belonging. His paintings speak to the viewer with irony, but also with tenderness.”

There’s something to look forward to.

Featured image 2006 © Eldar Einarson