Matt Houghton on Lina/Laviai

Earlier today we saw the release of Lina/Laviai, a passion project from director Matt Houghton following twin sisters Lina and Laviai Nielsen as they fought to gain a place at the London 2017 World Championships in Athletics.

shots caught up with the director to find out about his time with the sisters and how it became to be so "visually varied."

How did you find the story of Lina/Laviai?

I’m a sucker for sports documentaries and I’m a huge athletics fan. I’d been looking to make a short sports documentary for a while but I wanted to find a story that felt unique. After reading an article online about Lina and Laviai I was struck by the symmetry of it all. Twin sisters who train together and run the same event who were both inspired to compete by their experience as volunteers at London 2012. Throw in the fact that their dream was to return to that same stadium five years later and it felt like a totally one-off story. 

How long did you spend with the sisters and how long did the short take to shoot?

I think I spent about a year with them on and off. I started just by hanging out with them, taking photographs and getting to understand their relationship a bit. I shot some test footage on an old DV camera, just as an experiment really, but when I watched it back I was really taken with the rawness of it. It felt so unvarnished and pure so I decided to use it as my starting point. 

We then shot with Lina and Laviai in a more structured way for a couple of days with a small (and brilliant) crew. Initially, the plan was never for the film to be so visually varied but as the edit went on we felt like we needed more to tell the story so we added the archive and the Instagram photos. So where the film’s ended up really was a process of experimentation and evolution. 

Why do you think this story resonates so strongly with viewers?

My hope is that it’s a story that resonates with different people in different ways. This particular story has a lot of different layers. The girls live right down the road from Olympic Park and I love the fact that it’s a very London-centric film. It’s also about the dedication and sacrifice it takes to become an athlete and about the legacy of 2012. But at the centre of it all is this totally unique relationship that kind of transcends all that. 

Particularly with my documentary work, I like to deal with subjects that are quite niche and unusual but the idea is always to tell the story in a way that can be engaging for anyone. 

How easy was it to shoot the film while the sisters were training?

As you can imagine, Lina and Laviai train a lot, I think it’s six times a week. They were extremely generous with their time and let me come along to a lot of training sessions to shoot. For our more formal shoot, we shot in the autumn which definitely helped schedule-wise because they’re training regime is a little easier to work around at that time of year. 

Obviously, the film had to be out before the start of the World Championships. Was it difficult to work backwards from this deadline?

On paper, we had a lot of time to make this film but because it’s a short and everyone was fitting it around other work, it was definitely a challenge. In a way, it was great to have a hard deadline because we all wanted the film to feel relevant and of its time. But I always end up feeling like I could have done with an extra week!