Bjørn Melhus

Movie - 2023, 2h 15m • as Piotr

When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.

Movie - 2015, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role

Against the backdrop of an unfathomable megalopolis, in a story that follows the associative qualities of a dream logic, the protagonists quote from concepts of neo-liberal elitism, and a mix of religious delusions and hallucinations of the apocalypse. The film begins in a sacral space, where Randi, a figure that references Ayn Rand, transforms a parapsychological medium into two digital clouds and sends them on a journey through a megalopolis in full growth. There they materialize as two bodies, which go by the names of Mr. Freedom and Ms. Independence.

Movie - 2011, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role

In reference to the trailer of Psycho (USA 1960), narrated in German by Alfred Hitchcock himself, a gardener with a chainsaw guides us through the premises of the Herbert Gerisch Foundation in Schleswig-Holstein 51 years later. The visit ends, just like in the original trailer…, in a bathroom.

Movie - 2005, 2h 15m • as Captain

Melhus slips into the role of the captain of a space ship, accompanied by a bold man and a boy in his communion suit. Threatened by a dark power and while stars are exploding in the background, all three perambulate in dialogues, cut from different science-fiction films.

Movie - 2026, 2h 15m • as Houseless Man

Ingeborg and Adam are visionary hand surgeons bound by love, control, and irresistible fixations. She is compelled to steal objects; he longs to become one. When an accident brings the enigmatic Gaia into their lives, unexpected desires begin to take shape.

Movie - 1995, 2h 15m • as Dorothy

With her green bow in her hair, a naïve Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz embodies an aspect of the artist’s own personal context. She is dreaming about going beyond the confines of her urban surroundings, amongst thousands of flickering windows in apartment blocks, to travel somewhere over the rainbow. As she stumbles upon her yellow brick road, a bedside telephone, her communications take her far far away, becoming entangled in her obsession with connecting to this far away place. Swept into a cyclone of dizzying imagery, she becomes somewhat more realized, sceptical about who she is and her dreams. Much like the ubiquity of television, her dreams are nothing more than commodified imagination that has nonetheless shaped her life. In this fairy-tale land, she desperately tries to find her way back home.