In advance of International Production Design Week, running October 17 through 26, 2025, we asked eight designers to discuss a single prop or piece of scenery from their work and its role in the world of the film. This feature was produced by Javier Irazuzta.
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025).
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (2025) is about family and the traces we leave behind. After their mother’s death, sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) return to the family house, going through their mother’s belongings. Agnes insists they must decide what to keep: things with “sentimental value.” She points to a tall vase, casually declaring she likes it and wants to keep it. Nora, usually dismissive, suddenly claims it too. The moment is playful, almost childish, a comic struggle for ownership of something neither of them really needs.
The vase soon becomes an action prop, nearly knocked over as Nora flees their father’s sudden return. Both fragile and absurd, the image turns slapstick into something quietly moving: memory and ambivalence held in glass. The empty vase, undeniably symbolic, gestures toward the film’s larger theme of absence and longing. Its shape could suggest a body, onto which the loss of a mother might be unconsciously projected. Perhaps this is why Nora grabs it, even though the vase apparently holds no sentimental meaning for her. It is also just a vase, a functional object for placing flowers inside. This ordinary and symbolic tension makes it the perfect object to carry the film’s theme.
Photograph courtesy of the author.
We needed a vase that might have belonged to their grandparents in the 1940s, yet still feel desirable to the sisters today—something that could carry its own story, bought abroad as a symbol of taste and curiosity, then kept across generations. Inspired by mid-century Murano glass, we asked a Norwegian glassblower to create three unique versions, since originals were too rare and costly.
We would end up with an object of sentimental value—though the film treats it without sentimentality, letting beauty, humor, and fragility speak instead.
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025).
Continue reading “The Prop and the Production Designer.”