CPH:DOX 2022: ‘A House Made of Splinters’ Interview of Simon Lereng Wilmont

We were delighted to interview director Simon Lereng Wilmont about his profoundly moving and nicely crafted feature documentary A House Made of Splinters, which debuted at Sundance, and presented at CPH:DOX 2022.

One of our favourite feature documentaries discovered so far during the new festival season, A House Made of Splinters, is presented at CPH:DOX 2022 where we had the pleasure of sitting down with director Simon Lereng Wilmont for an interview.

In a large ramshackle house near the front line in war-torn eastern Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian women run an orphanage. Here, children whose homes have been shattered by poverty, violence and alcohol can stay safely for up to nine months until a decision is made on whether to return them home, foster them or move them to another orphanage. But when one child checks out of the orphanage, a new one always checks in, missing her parents – like Kolia, who smokes cigarettes on the sly, steals and draws tattoos on his arms, but also looks after her younger siblings and collapses crying into her drunk mother’s arms in Simon Lereng Wilmont’s award-winning film.

As pointed out in our Sundance review of Simon Lereng Wilmont’s poignant film, A House Made of Splinters is a multilayered, poignant and heavy story sure to leave audiences heartbroken. The filmmaker deftly handles a difficult subject, creating intimacy around his camera and generating a delicate, genuinely human, and incredibly emotional portrait of a cruel reality.

We were therefore thrilled to meet Simon Lereng Wilmont in person in Copenhagen for an interview.