Anita Receives Three-Year Government Grant – and the Long Film is Getting Closer

DOVRE, March 2026 – There is good news to share from the mountains of Dovre.

Anita Killi has been awarded a three-year working grant from Statens kunstnerstipend – the Norwegian Government Grants for Artists. It is one of the most prestigious forms of artistic support available in Norway, and for Anita, it means something very concrete: time. Time to write, to develop, and to make the films she has been carrying inside her for years.

For those who have followed Trollfilm for a while, you will know that Anita's films do not arrive quickly – and that is precisely the point. Angry Man, The Hedge of Thorns, Mother Didn't Know – these are films built by hand, frame by frame, from paper and light and silence. Films that have found their way into schools, therapy rooms, and child welfare education across the world, and that continue to be screened decades after they were made. That kind of filmmaking takes the kind of focus that is hard to sustain alongside the daily demands of running a studio, teaching, and travelling as a cultural ambassador.

This grant changes that.

Anita in her element at her studio – working on the gnome character who will play a central role in the feature film "Christmas Survivors".

With a new producer now on board – that would be me – and a fully renovated studio here at Killi farm ready for serious work, Anita can now turn her full attention to Christmas Survivors. It is the story of nine-year-old Maja, who carries far too great a responsibility for her secretly alcoholic mother in the days leading up to Christmas on a Norwegian farm. A story about loyalty, survival strategies – and what it means to finally be allowed to be a loved child. The story has been growing in Anita since 2001, some of it rooted in personal and family experience, and it shows in the material: there is an emotional truth to it that is difficult to fabricate.

For Anita, the grant is not just practical support. After a period of illness and years of splitting her energy in too many directions, it is also a kind of recognition – a signal that the work matters, and that the time to make it has come.

We are grateful. And we are ready.