Made of Light

By placing light inside wood, sculptor Ole Jakob Nielsen illuminates us with the dreams, stories and mysteries hidden within the secret world of trees. While based in a country completely devoid of trees—The Faroe Islands—his work brings us closer to their very soul.

Yannick Jamey – Writer/Director/Producer/Editor
Ernst Reijseger – Music Composer/Musician

I think this short profile documentary captures the very ecstatic and spontaneous nature with which it was made.

I was traveling around the Faroe Islands — a landscape I was fascinated with — in search of film among its 50,000 inhabitants. I had heard about Ole, a local wood sculptor, and the idea of a wood sculptor in a tiny treeless country already got me excited from the beginning. Upon knocking on his door the chemistry was instant and we shot this film together in one and half days.

I basically just got to know him by filming him. And after the final shot, he took me around the country to meet the rest of his charismatic and artistic family — his wife a poet, his daughter a puppeteer and his son a filmmaker.

As Ole had a very poetic worldview and philosophy on his work and life in general, I wanted to flood the film with as much poetry as possible through music and the ideas presented by Ole’s observations and my own, and the conversation between us throughout.

While I never had any particular interest in trees per se, what really fascinated me about Ole’s work is how close it gets to that blurry line between reality and projection. Some of the coincidences in his sculptures are so great that you really question whether it’s possible for them to not be random and part of some deeper meaning.

I’m really attracted to things that invite us into that liminal space where our imagination starts to take over and the question of “truth” or fact no longer really matters. There is as much beauty and truth in something imaginary as in something already existing, and as a filmmaker, I like to invite the viewer to leap into that space that only cinema can take us. And documentary, as “factual” as it’s meant to be, is no exception.