Three by Anne Haugsgjerd
Monday, September 14, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Organized by Mike Sperlinger (PRISMS)
Life in Frogner, Anne Haugsgjerd, 1986, digital projection, 21 mins
Good Girl...Sit Down!, Anne Haugsgjerd, 1991, digital projection, 17 mins
More Woman More Cry, Anne Haugsgjerd, 2021, digital projection, 24 mins
Anne Haugsgjerd (b. 1944) is a filmmaker for whom the obstacles to success have become subject matter. She has been making short films since the 1980s, but for a long time received little recognition, either in Norway’s relatively conservative (and chauvinist) film world or beyond. Undeterred, she has continued to produce an uncategorizable body of films—she herself calls them “bastards.” What they have in common is how Haugsgjerd transforms real filmmaking dilemmas into self-reflexive vignettes full of self-deprecating humor and, increasingly, a wry acknowledgment of her own aging. The nearest comparison is perhaps the much-loved British artist John Smith, but Haugsgjerd’s films return more insistently to the paradoxical impossibility of their own making.
Educated as an a graphic designer at the Norwegian School of Crafts and Design, Haugsgjerd only began working with film around 1980, initially as an assistant editor, before directing her first short, Life in Frogner. Haugsgjerd was stuck trying to edit footage she had shot of a well-to-do area of west Oslo when she came across the work of Swedish experimental filmmaker Eric M. Nilsson; a subsequent exchange with Nilsson became the inspiration for the film’s extraordinary voiceover, in which it becomes clear that (to paraphrase John Lennon) a film is what happens when the filmmaker is busy making other plans. Typically for Haugsgjerd’s career, the film won the public prize from the Norwegian short film festival in 1986 only after having been rejected for the same festival’s official program.
Her next film, Good Girl...Sit Down!, came similarly out of an editing impasse: what to do with footage from a dog show. Overcome by the ridiculousness of the spectacle, Haugsgjerd made her own ambivalence the film’s red thread, soundtracking it with a tender and funny conversation with her therapist.
Haugsgjerd has had a purple patch in the last decade, with a series of award-winning new works and some belated recognition, both in Norway and elsewhere, partly sparked by a retrospective at the Oberhausen film festival in 2016. More Woman More Cry exemplifies her method of turning limitations—of both life and production—into content, a film described as “a naked story about aging, gravity and smoking weed.” Her work remains both disarmingly frank and deeply unembarrassed. Think of it as a kind of counter-cringe.
- MS
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing information@lightindustry.org at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.