Author Johan Melin talks about the completed Claudia Trilogy - Virtual Roses, Great One Digit and Holy As Robots with Nikolina Stojanova. It became a lovely discussion about art, love, Skopje, AI, happiness and the rage against the machine. We talk about dystopian worlds, magical realism. How Virtual Roses came about. Troll factories and misinformation. Illusions about state and countries. The false narrative of AI. We must reclaim humanity. Democracy on shaken ground. Big Brother pls see me. The self-reporting to the machine. Great One Digit. A farewell to language and a future seen through the eyes of two kids outside of society. Avatars in kafanas. Great One Bildungsnovel. The fighting over fictions and God. Gaza bombed back to stoneage in order to become luxury resorts for settlers. The modern dull times. What makes us Happy. Holy as robots. The return of Manolevski and the Holoverse. How everyone swallows a cyanide pill in the hope of going online again. Time travelling. Killing your grandfather and trying to change the past. To be here and now. The new novel takes place in our time. Why is it easier to imagine the apocalyptic future than a good one. How we imported the warning signs from the scifi. It's never too late trying to save the humans. Brutal hypercapitalistic statusthink that we all work inside. Reclaiming humanistic virtues. Seeing the world as one. The ancient hippie word, solidarity. How countries get indebted. The destructive absurd chains that force people to live terrible lives. The waste machine. America, a third world country based on a entertainment dream. The flipside and poverty of a dream. Follow the money in the decline of Yugoslavia. How stories became an asset. Can an AI make the suits change their minds? Culture replaced with consumage. The Instadream. Is everything measurable? The sport of winning. Alienation. Life of pretenses. Cinematic storytelling in the novels. Skopje life. Outcasts. Mass Culture and algorithms. The love for Skopje. The controversial word of peace. Is anybody on the right track these days. How Sweden's ultracapitalism created the rift in society. Chasing the wrong dream on autopilot. The world can be a better place. To talk about these issues. The Machine is us. Creating a crisis narrative. Ask an AI how we can build a world that is not horrible. To find our way back home. The Virtues.

"Go out and find life again. It can´t be that hard."

“Preludium” will always hold a special place in my heart. It was my first feature to come out in Denmark and the world — and it was done in a one single take, making it the first multiplot film in the world without any cuts. A tragedy done as comedy on one night in 2007. The film premiered with a bang on Gothenburg Film Festival 2008 and travelled quite a lot all over Europe. It seems to have its own life since we completed it without a single cut that magical night. In this episode of MADE UNMADE me and the actress Patricia Schumann who plays Eva in the film talk about the process, about freedom and being here and now, making magic out of nothing, the collective efforts and the joy of film making. TRIGGER WARNING: This episode will be in Danish and my Swanish, a mix of swedish and danish. I would like to thank Patricia for sharing her stories and memories of how we made this gemstone, and to all you listeners who followed and listened to the first season of MADE UNMADE. More and more I feel this is a show about creative processes. Season Two will be WILD. It taught me two things (and that goes for Preludium as well): 1. To create here and now with what you got. 2. Put Joy and Love into the process, and it will be eternal. And watch the film here:

www.vimeo.com/johanbmelin/preludium

When half way through the journey of our life I found that I was in a gloomy wood, because the path which led aright was lost. So bitter it is, that death is little worse, but of good to treat which there I found, I'll speak of what else is there. Johan Melin digs into The Brightening - a film about Dante Olsson (Rainer Gerdes), a blocked writer who tries to live the normal life with his wife Anette (Patricia Schumann) - but everything changes when he meets femme fatale and muse Natalja (Anna Fabricius) and Dante receives a message from God to commit the biggest sin of them all... A film which after many years in the making finally saw the light of the cinema in 2019. About art vs the machine, praying for cakes falling from the sky, going your own way, the ensemble G.A, the hamster wheel and breaking out of it - and looking after lost master tapes.

My good friend, the great actor Anders Hove guests MADE UNMADE to talk about our magnum opus MISFITS. The film circles around ARNE (Anders Hove) - a man who has burnt all his bridges and the day before New Year’s Eve must face his lost daughter, L who is back in Copenhagen, now a junkie. Maybe Arne has one shot at redemption before he leaves the table. The film was a mosaic look on a handful of lonely people, all of them Misfits, and somehow related to Arne - the gambler Michael Herzstein (Nicolas Bro) and his wife Rikke (Louise Mieritz) , the disgraced cop Gustav (Thomas Gabrielsson) who was in love with L, Arne´s other daughter Annabell (Anna Fabricius) falling into obscurity and Arne´s lost rockstar son, Johnny (Jakob Cedergren). It was and is a story about people on the edge, who maybe can change the unfortunate course of their lives. Anders and I talk about why supporting characters are more interesting than the lead (and to kick them in the balls), about defending your character, if it´s possible to depict a state of mind while arriving at darkness, about our confused times and its anxiety of honesty. A conversation with a lot of heart and laughs — and finally how this unmade gem of a film is still in the making now, 18 years later — how it will become the film “Arne Hansen´s Last Christmas".

My great friend, the Shakespeare from Balkan - writer Dejan Dukovski and I got together in Skopje to revisit our unmade film "Café Lehmitz". Did we bring it back to life, go full-on Back to the future. Yes, we did. Based on the photographer Anders Petersens famous pictures and with his blessing, Dukovski and Melin wrote a handful of stories which connected through the legendary Lehmitz - a place that was open Twenty-four-seven in Hamburg. It was a tender, loving look at some lovely misfits who gathered in Lehmitz, looking for connectivity. Shot on glorious black and white film in 35 mm. We talk about the story behind the rise and fall of Lehmitz, about these self-censored lonely times where everyone is an island versus the radical times of the 70´s and how to find a refuge in a shared collective madness.

Johan dives into his graduation film from The National Film School of Denmark, STEPPENWOLVES - together with the great actor Jakob Cedergren as co-host. They go into things like why all work and no play makes you a dull boy, acting, writing, a man coming and being a chamelon, a steppenwolf. Easily the funniest episode in the brief history of Made Unmade, recorded in Barik, Skopje.

Johan Melin digs into his greatest love story about the loneliest girl in the world, SOFIA NANNING who works at a bed factory in a smalltown and takes care of her dysfunctional family. When she's run down in a car accident by JAKOB LODIN who just got out of prison, it's the unlikely beginning of a true romance. Romeo & Juliet lives in the countryside, but tragedy awaits them both...

Writer-Director Johan Melins film Köftbögen (Smalltown) came out against all odds in 2003. Made on a shoe-string budget this punk love story about the last days of the summer of 1994 in Herrljunga when you are sixteen and nothing and everything happens all at once. Johan re-visits his autobiographical debut and tells the story about how they made it.