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Christmas Survivors
By Anita Killi
Synopsis
Nine-year-old Maja has spent her entire life concealing the problem and caring for her alcoholic mother. Calm, practised — as if she has done this many times before. She manages the household, looks after her little brother Ola, and keeps the secret from the world.
When Christmas comes, Malin's boyfriend Rolf takes her to Paris and leaves the children at his family's farm in Dovre — with his gentle, elderly mother Betty and his withdrawn brother Laurits. He has no idea that it is nine-year-old Maja who holds the family together.
Betty's farm is everything Maja has never known: warm, safe, unhurried. The wise grandmother sees at once what the girl is carrying — and quietly begins to set it down for her. Ola, meanwhile, has discovered the farm's barn elf, invisible to everyone but him.
Betty sends Maja and Laurits up into the mountains to fetch a horse. A storm closes in. Sheltering in a small mountain chapel, Laurits finally opens up: nine years ago, on a night just like this one, he lost his wife and their unborn child. Maja listens. She has spent her whole life reading the pain of adults. But this is the first time any adult has trusted her with theirs.
When Malin and Rolf arrive for Christmas Eve, something has shifted in Maja. But the night brings confrontation — and in despair, Maja cuts off her own hair. It is Laurits who finds her, and sits with her, and listens.
In the middle of the night, the sow gives birth. In the quiet effort to save one small lifeless piglet, mother and daughter have their first real conversation. Small, faltering — but real.
For the first time, Maja is seen, safe, and truly valued. Nine years old, and finally allowed simply to be a child.
Mission
Christmas Survivors exists because there is a story that has never quite been told — and because many children around the world are living it right now, without anyone noticing.
Parentification is one of childhood's most common and least visible experiences. These are the children who manage the adults around them instead of being cared for themselves. Who keep the secrets. Who have never simply been allowed to be children. In Norway alone, research estimates that at least 160,000 children are currently carrying adult caring responsibilities. Most of them are invisible — not because no one looks at them, but because they are so skilled at making sure no one needs to worry.
We believe animation can reach these children in a way that other forms cannot. The image is never quite real, which means the feeling can be entirely real — without the confrontation that would close a child's heart. Through handcraft, texture and silence, we can approach what is difficult to say directly, and let each viewer meet the story from where they stand in their own life.
We also know, from experience, that this kind of film can have a very long life. Angry Man and Hedge of Thorns are still in use in schools and therapy rooms decades after they were made. That quiet, lasting reach is what we are aiming for again.
Christmas Survivors is a Christmas film for the whole family. But beneath the snow and the candlelight, it is an invitation — to children who carry too much, and to the adults around them — to finally see what has been hiding in plain sight.
About the film
Christmas Survivors is a stop-motion animated feature film — handcrafted, lyric-poetic, rooted in the deep midwinter of the Dovre mountains. It is a Christmas film in the truest sense: warm, full of wonder, and honest about the things that are hard to say.
The film is made using cut-out multiplane technique, a deeply physical craft in which every frame is built and photographed by hand. The snow on screen is made from sea salt, sugar and flour. The fur on the barn elf's coat is musk ox wool gathered from the trees of Dovrefjell. Nothing in this film is artificial at its core — and that commitment to authentic materiality is fundamental to how it communicates emotionally.
Trollfilm is currently developing a new digitally controlled multiplane stand in collaboration with Claus Gladyszak as industrial designer and Almli Mechanical as electromechanical specialists in Dovre — a technical innovation that enables unprecedented depth and precision in the multiplane image while remaining entirely rooted in handcraft.
The short film Mother Didn't Know (2020), directed by Anita Killi with music by Zbigniew Preisner, was made as a proof-of-concept for this visual style. It has since screened at over 25 festivals across five continents.
The film has been developed in close collaboration with clinical specialist Nora Sveaass and is intended for audiences from age 8 and upwards, with younger children welcome when accompanied by an adult.
Co-produced with Animoon Sp. z o.o. in Łódź, Poland — one of Europe's leading stop-motion studios, with eight simultaneous production sets. We are also actively seeking contact with NGOs and foundations working within children's mental health, family welfare and maternal alcoholism — for collaboration and possible co-financing, particularly in Japan, where these issues remain largely unspoken, and in the Nordic countries.