Petra Revenue

Biography

Petra Revenue is a Swedish playwright, screenwriter, and director. She has published several books and short story collections since 2006 but is also active in radio, television, film, and theater. Since 1990, she has been one of the driving forces behind Teater Trixter, one of Gothenburg's largest independent theatre groups. Petra Revenue made her debut as a screenwriter in 1992 and about 20 of her works have been staged in various forms, several of them critically acclaimed. Revenue is a wildly cross-genre screenwriter since she started her work for film and television around the year 2000, she has, for example, written screenplays for two of the film adaptations of Henning Mankell's Wallander, Stora teatern - an absurd drama for SVT, and the award-winning youth film Isdraken. Her long and broad experience can also be seen in her commitment to education, today she is one of the main people behind Alma Löv's script education and also teaches dramaturgy at Akademi Valand. Petra Revenue's directorial debut in the film industry came in 2009 with the feature film Karaokekungen based on her own short story with the same title. The film's elevated style and visual expression - "magical realism" - carry clear and conscious features from the theater, a mix in line with Revenue's vision for the script. Her next film as a director and screenwriter is also based on her own short story, Den bästa utsikten, which in 2009 won the Swedish Radio short story prize. The short film Den bästa utsikten addresses a common theme at Revenue, namely ambivalence, this time in a meeting between everyday reflections and absurdities that point to visible and invisible boundaries. Petra Revenue's interest in crossing boundaries and crossing them early on - before she was artistically active she studied social anthropology. The interest clearly lingers, even in the recurring focus on language and culture as both barriers and bridges. In 2017, Revenue returned to children's and youth films as a screenwriter and director together with Samir Arabzadeh on the film Märta Proppmätt. The 3D animated film is about the voracious goldfish Märta who, despite a heart of gold, has a tendency to think of herself first. Now she must learn respect and acceptance in a film that aims to raise issues of ecology, the Earth's common resources, and solidarity for young children.