CAA Signs ‘Schoolmaster Games’ Director Ylva Forner (EXCLUSIVE)

Manori Ravindran
·2 min read

Swedish screenwriter and director Ylva Forner has signed with CAA for representation.

Forner’s feature film debut “The Schoolmaster Games” premiered in April and screened at the Göteborg Film Festival. The queer boarding school drama is based on Kristofer Folkhammar’s acclaimed novel “Magisterlekarna.”

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The film, which was acquired for sales by LevelK in 2020, has a daring conceit, turning on an all-male school, St. Sebastian Academy, where homosexuality is the norm among students. Forner described her film as a “melodrama for the 2020s.”

“In a universe inspired by high school movies and ’90s boy bands, pulsating with burning desires, we tell a story of hierarchies and power structures that has been demolished and rebuilt again,” said Forner.

While the film’s setting is “heightened and playfully camp,” as the story goes on, the school becomes a “mirror of our everyday world and turns into a conversation about the deep universal urge to belong to something — someone — and to be loved for who you really are.”

“Schoolmaster Games” also played at the Outshine Film Festival in Florida and the Die Roza Filmtagen in Amsterdam.

Forner studied directing at the Centre d’Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya, and wrote and directed her first short “Polvo,” which premiered in 2001 at the Rooftop Film Festival in New York, and ”Deshielo” in 2004.

Forner’s 2013 short film “Gaming” was selected for the Palm Springs Shortfest, Montreal Film Festival and the São Paulo International Short Film Festival.

In 2009, she received the prestigious SWEA Los Angeles Scholarship, and was selected to be part of the Berlinale Talent program at the Berlin Film Festival.

Forner continues to be represented by The Salomosson Agency in Sweden.

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