Weightless follows Lea, a 15-year-old who is spending her summer at a health camp on the Danish coast, with the intention of losing weight. There she finds a friend in Sasha, her confident, free-spirited roommate, whose ease in her own skin is everything Lea wants for herself. But it's Rune, a warm and attentive camp instructor, whose attention Lea isn't quite sure whether to keep as a secret or a prize.
Before her feature debut, Emilie established herself as a commercial and short film director with a particular gift for intimacy, drawn to the interior lives of women and girls.
As Emilie explains, the film began from a personal place, born from conversations between the director and her sister, who also plays Lea’s mother.
"We often talked about what it means to grow up in a body that people have opinions about before you’ve even had the chance to form your own relationship to it.
I myself spent some years as a child in a bigger body, and my sister still lives in one, so it was something that carried both a shared tenderness and a shared pain between us."
The film premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2025, and went on to win several awards, including the festival’s prestigious New Directors Award, as well as the FIPRESCI Award at the Gothenburg Film Festival in 2026.
Having finally had its theatrical release in Danish cinemas in February this year, Emilie reflects on the process of writing from personal memory and the complexity of female friendships, a theme central to the film.
“When Marianne Lentz (Scriptwriter) and I began working together, we were very aligned in our intention. We kept repeating the same mantra to each other:
We wanted to take the young girl and her experiences seriously.
In many stories, she is talked about or judged, but rarely allowed to fully exist as a complex person. We spent a lot of time discussing tone, perspective and the emotional truth of Lea’s experience. The film needed to stay firmly rooted in her point of view, so the audience really gets to experience with her. That perspective shaped everything in the script.”
The film asks a lot of its audience in terms of trust. How did you make sure the research behind it was as grounded as the story itself?
In some ways, I still feel that I have access to that emotional landscape. The teenage years are a moment where you suddenly become very aware of how others see you, and where a lot of your sense of value is placed in other people’s hands. That shift from moving freely through the world as a child to suddenly becoming visible can be very intense, and those feelings stayed with me.
But it was important that the film didn’t rely only on my own memories. As part of the process, we interviewed young people who had been in situations similar to those depicted in the film. Some had attended health camps like the one in the story, and others had experienced complicated relationships with older authority figures, like teachers or coaches. Those conversations helped us ground the material in lived experiences and better understand how unequal power dynamics can shape these kinds of relationships.
Some small details also come directly from real life. A few lines of dialogue come from my own teenage diary and my sister’s. Small details in the production design or costumes are inspired by real people and camp memories. And certain experiences in the film are inspired by stories people shared with us during research. It was important to us that everything in the film felt authentic and true.
There's a tenderness to the way the film handles female friendship, but also a real tension. What drew you to that dynamic as a central thread?
For me, female friendship is one of the central emotional landscapes of adolescence. It can be incredibly intimate and supportive, but it is also often where comparison, insecurity and longing become most visible.
In the film, Lea’s relationship with her friend Sasha becomes a kind of mirror. I was interested in how friendships can both empower and destabilise us at that age. They are often the first place where we rehearse identity. You learn who you are partly through the way you see yourself reflected in someone else.
Given the sensitive and personal nature of the narrative, it felt natural for Emilie to recruit a female-centric crew who would shape the gaze behind the camera.
“When you are working with sensitive themes and quite vulnerable material, and especially with a young cast, I think the role of the director is not only to cast the actors but also to cast the crew.
It’s not just about finding the most talented people, but also about choosing collaborators who will help create a safe, respectful and attentive environment on set.”
You became a mother during the making of this film. Has that shifted how you see it now that it's out in the world?
Becoming a mother inevitably changes the way you look at the world. When I started working on the film, I was thinking mostly from the perspective of the young girl in the story. Now I also find myself thinking about the adults around her in a slightly different way.
Before having children, I was quite afraid of what motherhood might “ruin” for me career-wise. I worried about falling out of the conversation or being offered fewer opportunities. But what I see now is how much it has given me. Not necessarily in terms of work opportunities, but in the way it has shaped me as a person, and how I think and work. I think it has made me a more empathetic collaborator, and (I hope) a better leader on set, and ultimately a more attentive artist.
At the same time, it has deepened my sense of how vulnerable those formative years are and how much responsibility adults carry in the relationships they have with young people.
Watch the trailer for Weightless, and see Emilie’s commercial work here.