Today, Katharina Gellein Viken and her co-director and life partner Charles Kriel discuss a topic close to their hearts in honour of Fathers Day weekend - their fathers, of course. 

Says Kat, "Our parents shape us. I don’t think I really understood what that phrase meant until I became a mother, how utterly and completely a child is at your mercy and shapes their whole world view and model for how to live and conduct their relationships around how you behave. Your fathers and mothers are your foundation. Some of them are wonderful. Some are okay. Some are unbelievably abusive and crappy, and yet others manage to be a combination of those."

"Charles and I have been together five years but known each other for much longer. We have sometimes struggled with our differences - we are from two very different cultures, America and Scandinavia, we had very different upbringings, and we have a large age gap. But funnily enough that meant that our dads were actually contemporaries. Charles’s father Richard Lowell Kriel was born in 1934, my father Peter Theodor Viken was born in 1930. So my father was older than yours, although he died in 1994 and Dick died in 2011. 
What we can certainly say is both of them were larger than life characters and shaped our lives for better and worse."