In production
Budo Girls (expected 2027)
Experimental documentary film in production.
What does it mean to watch someone become who they are?
Budo Girls follows four Ugandan women from their final year of high school in 2009 to the present, through university, work, love, marriages, and a world that kept changing around them. Filmed across fifteen years in Uganda, Hungary, Norway, and the USA, the film is a portrait of four specific people, and an investigation into what documentary film can and cannot do with a human life.
Filmed and directed by Linn Obrestad. Made with support from Fritt ord foundation and Sørnorsk Filmsenter.
Full project description under Current work
Geological Confidence (expected 2027)
Multi-screen essay film / installation, in development
A field-based filmwork about Fensfeltet / the Fen Complex in Norway and Minas Gerais, Brazil, investigating what happens to a place when the ground beneath it is renamed a deposit. The title comes from the language of mineral assessment, geological confidence is the technical measure of how certain an industry is about what lies beneath the surface. The film works beside and against that certainty, staying close to what such measurement cannot see, include, or hold.
Full project description under Current work
Selected films
No Significant Impact (2026)
Ode to Invisible (2025)
Potential (2026)
Travels in Reality (2024)
Silva Incognita (2026)
Hotter than Before (2024)
Earlier works (selected)
If the word for world is forest, o = oak (2024)
0=oak · video · 60 min/loop · no dialogue · Norway
In a forest near my home stands an ancient oak tree, estimated to be around 1,000 years old. A few years ago, a significant portion of the oak split off, and I thought that the tree would die. Yet, against all expectations, the remaining trunk continues to thrive, while the fallen section has transformed into a rich microhabitat that shelters a diverse array of life.
Part of Science New Wave's Forest Initiative: Scenes from the Forest (New York, 2024)
Bombus (2020/2022)
Bombus (2020) · video · 5:20 min · no dialogue · Norway
There are 35 species of bumblebee in Norway, around 250 in the world. Ten percent of them are threatened with extinction.
Bombus is the story of a bumblebee's brutal encounter with a car. Combining documentary footage of bumblebees struck by cars with an artistic exploration of one bumblebee's after-death experience, the work follows its search for answers.
Part of Apology no. III: Abundance, from the Apologies series.
Forest/Fortress (2019/2021)
Forest/Fortress (2021) · video · 7 min · no dialogue · Norway
A mother and her children move through a forest, intercut with a forest being eaten by a machine. Reworked and expanded from the earlier video Walk in the Woods (2019), the piece is tactile and edit-driven, frame-rate manipulation, single frames removed or replaced, until the image jitters and jags against its own surfaces.
The video explores how humans have become estranged from nature and how we no longer see ourselves as part of it, but as something outside it.
One more time and with you (2005)
(2005) · video · 5 min · no dialogue · Australia
Footage of children playing on a beach is intercut with drawings made by refugee children held in immigration detention at Port Hedland, Australia, drawings of what they had lived through, made before their release. The title comes from a child's letter to a father still in detention, describing things she has done with her friends and how I want to do it all one more time, and with you. Screened at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, Australia, First Frames, Sydney, Australia.
Earlier video works are held in Videokunstarkivet, the Norwegian national archive for video art, works available on request.