The form of the conversation shifts between a police questioning, a friendly reunion and a journalistic interview. The movie deals with the conditions of relations and communications, and circles around the issue of what's personal. When are you being honest and sincere? What is the meaning of an interview portrait when the distance between questions and answers becomes obvious? The dialogue is constructed by extracting parts from three books - A Lover’s Discourse: Fragment by Roland Barthes, Innamoramento e amore by Francesco Alberoni and Self-portraits - interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre. I chose these books because of their connections to relations, interview as a form and how the books relate to our deconstruction of our identity. Alberoni describes love as a process where we reorganize, revaluates and rewrites our own history of feelings and convictions. During that process, concepts such as honesty, authenticity and truth becomes vague. A Lover’s Discourse is itself constructed from other books. Roland Barthes also becomes a clear reference to how literatures have had to deal with the connection between a writer's life and his work. He represents the controversy around biography writing. He is of the opinion that the difficulty in creating a portrait is caused by the personality not being constant; instead it is a movement through time, impressions and events. Self Portraits consists of three interviews with Sartre with slightly different focuses. For example, he replies to questions about his everyday life, his love relations, about being a public figure, and how he deals with his success. But he also talks a lot about his work writing about Faulkner. He has a slightly more positive view than Barthes on the possibilities of creating a portrait, and he believes in his own method. But the line between fact and fiction in his writing is still diffuse. The biography writing borders on fiction. My method has been to read the books, make a selection and put the parts together. I have made some modernizations of the text, mostly of Sartre’s comments, since the translations I’ve used felt old-fashioned. But in order to keep the sense of construction in the dialogue, I haven’t gone all the way to spoken language. Since the character in my film is female, I’ve let her talk about men when e.g. Sartre mentions women. Hence, I haven’t changed the meaning when they talk about the opposite sex. When creating the dialogue, I was interested in seeing what happened if I took texts by men and let a female character carry their views and opinions. In that the interviewee isn’t shown and there’s no real crime described, the viewer is left to his own imagination. In film and literature there has been discussions about the need for role models when creating our own identities. In the feminism, the lack of female protagonists, heroes and anti-heroes been criticized, and in my teens I became aware of the lack of female writers in my bookshelves. Through the construction and staging of the film, I stress a distance between the text and me as a sender. It is not my words and opinions as an artist, instead it’s quotations from different books. At the same time, I relate to what’s personal. When am I, the artist, honest and when am I telling a story which I want the observer to believe? What is staged and what is real? Are we acting or are we acting ourselves, and is there a difference? I took three books by men with philosophical and theoretical reputation as a starting-point. By acting the character of their combined words, I show my self-reflection in their texts. And I refer to a discussion that has been held in both film and literature regarding the need for female role models, both sympathetic and unpleasant ones. What’s personal, and the possibility of creating a portrait or a self-portrait, is a very complex subject, and relates to how we look at creating and recreating our identities. <<