In Mountain of Gold, Roland Edzard worked with the people he encountered at a gold mine, building scenes from their own lives and directing real situations with methods borrowed from fiction. Edzard has described the film as a documentary made “like fiction”: he would call action and cut, while the miners remained themselves rather than performing written roles.

Kim Ekberg’s Doggerland was developed in a similarly open way. Working with non-professional performers, including a real mother and son, Ekberg began without a fixed script and invented scenes together with them. The characters grew out of the people themselves, while chance, first takes and the limitations of shooting on 16mm became part of the method.

Together, Edzard and Ekberg discuss trust, direction and collaboration: how to create performances without conventional acting, how much to control and how much to leave open, and what non-actors can bring to a film that trained performers sometimes cannot.