Espen Jan Folmo

LOOK UP is a documentary that weaves together psychology, cultural evolution, science, and spirituality. It was born from a profound need: to communicate essential ideas about interconnectedness and collective intelligence in a way that both touches and transforms. The inspiration came from a lifetime of research, psychotherapy practice, and personal exploration, distilled into a cinematic experience designed to resonate deeply with those ready to hear its call.

Our primary creative vision for LOOK UP was to create something as timeless as possible. We wanted to make a film that would not only resonate with our present era but also with future generations—a time-sculpture, to borrow Tarkovsky’s brilliant metaphor for cinema.

The Norwegian intellectual historian Trond Berg Eriksen has noted that rituals differ from ordinary actions because they reach through multiple layers of time simultaneously. This principle shaped our approach to the film’s structure and content. We sought not only to convey a message urgent for today, but to create a work capable of resonating across cultures and centuries. Rilke wrote that a writer, to craft the perfect sentence, must know everything—a task that is, of course, impossible. Similarly, we had to acknowledge our limitations while striving for the deepest possible insight.

This vision guided many of our most difficult creative choices. When we explored whether aging leaders should be able to send young soldiers to die in increasingly senseless wars, we faced a decision: Should we use historical images from World War II, or contemporary footage? Ultimately, we chose the latter—scenes from Gaza and Ukraine—to lend a deeper immediacy.

To balance this, we curated a wide range of visual materials from different cultures, centering the narrative around humanity's shared cultural treasures. In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes the brain as a filter that protects us from overwhelming knowledge. In LOOK UP, we sought the opposite: to open that filter—to create a window into our collective cultural consciousness.

The film’s narrative structure emphasized timelessness. Rather than classical dramaturgy, we allowed the story to flow between themes in a way that mirrors the natural movement of thought—similar to philosophical and religious texts. This was further reinforced by a soundtrack ranging from classical to experimental, anchoring the experience in something larger than our own time.

LOOK UP was primarily crafted by the two of us, much like an intricate dialogue. We collaborated as the Wachowski siblings once did—challenging, refining, and strengthening each other’s visions until a coherent, living film emerged. Our partnership was the crucible that transformed ideas into something greater than either of us could have achieved alone.

The greatest challenge was translating complex ideas into intuitive, visual experiences without sacrificing depth. Technically, rendering such a large and detailed film created enormous obstacles, including a three-week rendering process for the final cut. Philosophically, we had to continually refine, strip away, and trust the emergent structure of the film itself.

Among the many moments in LOOK UP, there is one that lingers like an afterimage: a young girl standing at a chalkboard, drawing, as the narrator gently weaves Wittgenstein’s reflection from his 1939 Cambridge lectures, attended by Alan Turing:

“When we learn spelling, we learn the spelling of the word ‘spelling,’ but we do not call that ‘spelling of the second order.’”

In this scene, we composed a cinematic fugue—a visual and auditory counterpoint inspired by Bach. The film folds over itself: the image subtly doubles, a mirrored echo, aligning precisely with the spoken words. The duplication is almost imperceptible at first, but when it clicks into place, it creates an invisible bridge between language, meaning, and perception.

This moment embodies our deepest ambition: to create cinema that does not illustrate ideas, but embodies them; where form and content spiral together like a double helix, unlocking understanding not through argument, but through resonance.

The greatest lesson we learned from making LOOK UP is twofold:

First: there are no shortcuts—and you only truly understand how a film should have been made after it is finished. Creation is not a straight line. It is evolutionary—full of experimentation, dead ends, and adaptation.

Second: true creation happens when you step aside and let something greater than yourself emerge. The film stops being "yours" and begins to create itself. It is an active, conscious receptivity—not passive, but participatory. In our next projects, we will trust the process more deeply, resisting the urge to steer prematurely.

LOOK UP is without question the project we are most proud of. It demanded everything—intellectually, emotionally, artistically. It forced us to integrate decades of insight across disciplines into a single, living expression. And perhaps most importantly, it became something larger than ourselves.

Focus on necessity over novelty. Create what must be created, not what is trending. If you aim only to entertain, you will be forgotten. If you dare to awaken—first yourself, then others—you may create something that endures. Respect your audience’s intelligence. Assume they can go deeper than you expect. And above all, create from a place of inner necessity, not external validation.

Since LOOK UP is primarily animated, our “actors” were ideas themselves. Our task was to bring emotion, tension, and revelation into concepts—treating each sequence as a living character. We worked like Stanislavski in spirit: finding the emotional truth behind every scene, even when working with pure abstraction.

Sound and music are the emotional architecture of LOOK UP. Espen's deep background in classical music shaped every scene structurally like a fugue, while Nini’s visual intuition anchored the spaces between the notes. We treated sound not as ornamentation but as an active narrative force, balancing silence and music as carefully as words and images.

We embrace feedback—but not all feedback is equal. We distinguish between criticism aimed at refinement and criticism aimed at erasure. Constructive friction between us improved the film enormously. From audiences, even the harshest reactions are valued when they signal that something moved them—whether to discomfort, reflection, or wonder.