Anna Eriksson (1977, Rauma, Finland) spent most of her childhood and teenage years travelling around the world because of her father’s job: India, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia are some of the countries she visited. Anna studied music from early on, recorded her first album after graduating and instantly became a huge success in Finland. She has recorded ten albums and won many awards since then, including Emma prizes (the Finnish Grammys) and the Teosto prize, one of the biggest art prizes in the Nordic countries.
Sigmund Freud attributed most human behaviour to the sexual instinct (Eros). With Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he added the death drive (Thanatos) to that behaviour. Freud referenced ancient past, 500 BC, when Empedocles argument about love and hate, deducting that sexual pleasure would place itself at the service of the death drives. Precisely, Eros and Thanatos are central to Anna Eriksson film, M.
And M is a hyperaesthetic film that establishes relations between cinema and painting, icon and body, image and story but, all in all, is the story about the unhappiness of a ‘woman’ who is desired but not loved, who is hurt, offended, lacerated, and dissected through generations by the male gaze. We talked to Anna Eriksson on the occasion of her visit to Berlin about the film, her influences and the politics of the female body.