swedishfilmfired by passion

by Fredrik Sahlin

Current Swedish cinema is local—but also international, moving freely between different worlds and shunning neither large nor small. It presents both totally ordinary characters and some extremely odd ones, and ranges in scope from epic megamovies to private cell phone films on microbudgets.

The new directors, who have just embarked on their careers, are as interested as their established predecessors in describing relationships—but from their own special perspectives rooted in contemporary Sweden. Their films feature both the undead and the very much alive.

Close collaboration between creative directors, producers and actors has yielded an array of multifaceted films rich in depth and color.

Swedish film—Fired by Passion describes how these moviemakers are trying out fresh approaches and exploring genres, extending boundaries or following traditions. Welcome to the new Swedish film scene!

swedish

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© 2008 Fredrik Sahlin and the Swedish Institute (SI)

The author alone is responsible for the views expressed in this book.

Translation Stephen Croall

Editor Eva Sigsjö

Graphic design Lobby Design, Stockholm

Cover photo: Josef Fares and Ingmar Bergman by Emelie Asplund and Magnus Skoglöf

Paper: Cover, Ensogloss 270 g Inside, Magno Satin 150 gPrinted in Sweden by LJ Boktryck AB, Helsingborg, 2008

ISBN 978-91-520-0970-3

The swedish insTiTuTe | Sharing Sweden with the worldThe Swedish Institute (SI) is a public agency that promotes interest in Sweden abroad. SI seeks to establish cooperation and lasting relations with other countries through strategic communication and cultural, educational and scientific exchanges.

Sweden.se, the country’s official gateway, is a rich source of information that provides a direct insight into contemporary Sweden in many different languages.

Sweden Bookshop has a wide range of books about Sweden and Swedish fiction in over 40 languages. The bookshop can be found at Slottsbacken 10 in central Stockholm and at www.swedenbookshop.com.

The Swedish Institute Box 7434 +46-8-453 78 00SE-103 91 Stockholm si@si.seSweden www.si.se and www.sweden.se

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swedishfilmfired by passion

by Fredrik Sahlin

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contents

Fredrik Sahlin has worked as a journalist and critic since 1991. He has been the resident film critic on Sveriges Television’s

(SVT’s) cultural news program, Kulturnyheterna, since 2001, and also writes about cinema on a freelance basis. As the host of SVT’s Närbild

(Closeup), he has interviewed some of Sweden’s foremost stage and screen performers. He co-authored the book Fucking Film and also

served on the Nordic Council Film Prize jury in 2005–2007.

inTrodUCTion 4

sWeden on sCreen 6

THe sToryTeLLers 10Roy Andersson 11Lukas Moodysson 12Ruben Östlund 12Agnieszka Lukasiak 13Jens Jonsson 14Maria Blom 14Josef Fares 15

THe prodUCers 16Anna Anthony 16Helen Ahlsson 17

THe aCTors 18Gustaf Skarsgård 18Sofia Ledarp 18Sofia Helin 20Magnus Krepper 20

Genres 21Documentaries 21Very Moving Pictures 24Comedy 26Crime movies 27Horror and special effects 29The Swedish knight 31

TeLevision 33

in ConCLUsion 34

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1 Editor’s note: English title in italics: International English title. Non-italicized. English title: A straight translation of the original Swedish title for the purposes of this publication.2 For web addresses, see the last page.

First, however, a few words about Ingmar Bergman2, easily the biggest name in Swedish film history. It is virtually impossible to write about Swedish cinema without saying at least something about the legendary Bergman. He is up there among screen giants such as Fellini, Fassbinder and Tarkovsky, and following his death in 2007, glowing epitaphs poured in from all corners of the world. Soon, however, people began to discuss his artistic legacy.

Does such a legacy really exist? Many say it does. Bergman was productive for so many years and his output for both stage and screen was so huge that anything else is unthinkable. If you look closely, you can find traces of Bergman in the work of most directors dealing with our inner landscape.

At the same time, however, the Swedish cinema scene has always been ambivalent towards Bergman —both the man and the myth. Among the new generation of filmmakers, few would admit to any direct inspiration from that particular quarter, and

a decade or so ago someone even coined the phrase “Bergman lies like a wet blanket over Swedish cinema.” The old rebel, who always went his own way, was now considered an inhibiting force.

Also, in the days when radical opinion reigned, many people on the political left felt he was too bourgeois to be considered a great artist, while the bourgeoisie (from which he came) saw him as a black sheep.

Now that he has quit the director’s chair for good, however, and the retrospectives and biographies are pouring in, most people agree that he was a giant of his era, a unique artist.

Ingmar Bergman was like no other: a creative mass of neuroses and demons. Which may of course be true of many people, but Bergman succeeded in describing his inner self, first on paper and then on stage and screen, and did so with such power and precision that his inner life became universally accessible and affected people profoundly all over the world.

The latest and brightest star of Swedish cinema is director Lukas Moodysson. Films such as Show Me Love1 (Fucking Åmål) and Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever) spread his name far beyond Sweden’s borders, and for his latest project, Mammoth (Mammut), the director himself has traveled across the world. Shot in Thailand, the U.S. and the Philippines, Mammoth is a huge production by Swedish standards, with a cast that includes international stars Gael García Bernal and Michelle Williams. At the other end of the scale we find An Extra-ordinary Study in Human Degradation (En enastående studie i mänsklig förnedring), a microbudget film shot on a cell phone. In other words, contemporary Swedish cinema covers a wide spectrum. With a few exceptions we focus on those who have recently embarked on their film careers, or who have traveled only a short way down the road.

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sweden onscreen

Today, many would argue that in fact these were not specifically Swedish phenomena—except, perhaps, the midsummer celebrations—and that it was not so much a case of in-depth study as of Nutley in effect exploiting our own stereotyped images of Swedes as a folksy, homogenous group. In short, he took our own expectations of what social comments should tell us about contemporary life, and filmed them for us.

The title of social commentator has always been much sought after in Sweden. Only a few years ago, Colin Nutley topped the list (he is still working, and drawing audiences, even if he is no longer viewed as Mr. Sweden), but nowadays the label is more often attached to filmmakers who report from Sweden’s segregated city suburbs.

Like most Western countries, Sweden has integra-

tion problems, which the film industry has largely chosen to approach through humor. For instance, in One Eye Red (Ett Öga Rött) from 2007, a teenage boy who calls himself the Sultan of Thought suffers at the sight of his father trying to become assimilated by means of the hateful—in the boy’s eyes—govern-ment integration plan. The father tries to absorb typi-cally Swedish habits such as eating Kalles Kaviar (a pink caviar sandwich spread) and listening to ABBA, while at the same time discarding his own customs and traditions, causing his son to rebel.

In Ciao Bella, which targets young audiences, a Swedish-Persian youth pretends to be Italian to have a chance at a date with a Swedish girl. In Elixir, a group of young immigrants discover a potion that quickly and effectively turns them into mild- mannered “Sweedies.”

Rising stars Evin Ahmad and Youssef Skhayri, as Yasmine and Halim, the “Sultan of Thought,” in One Eye Red, directed by Daniel Wallentin.

Not so long ago, many agreed that the filmmaker who had best managed to capture Sweden and the Swedish character was—from the U.K. Colin Nutley, to be precise. In one film after another in the 1980s and 1990s, this British immi-grant director burrowed deep into such Swedish phenomena as the midsummer feast, compulsory military service, the dance band scene and surly, reactionary farming folks.

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3 The Swedish Film Institute, whose board is government-appointed, distributes funding in various forms to the Swedish film industry. The bulk of production subsidies go to movies that the Institute’s consultants decide are worth investing in. There are two such consultants for feature films and they serve for three-year periods.

regional filmmaking. Most successful in this respect was the regional resource and production center in western Sweden, Film i Väst (Film West). Here, in what an optimistic producer dubbed Trollywood (after Trollhättan, the town in which Film i Väst is based), Denmark’s Lars von Trier has directed big names such as Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall and Björk (in Dogville, Manderlay, and Dancer in the Dark). But most importantly, it has produced a growing number of Swedish films that dare to suggest Sweden is more than just Stockholm.

The cameras are still rolling in the west, but over the years production centers in other regions, parti-cularly Filmpool Nord way up in northern Sweden, have become experts at tempting film workers away from Stockholm to less densely populated areas. In 2007–2008, a number of films opened that had been produced in the north, either wholly or in part. They included major projects such as Sunstorm (Solstorm), Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) and

Wolf (Varg)—the latter a drama focusing on the wolf’s right to live, a controversial issue that is fiercely debated in some parts of Sweden.

Also, the capital has come into its own once again with a number of successful productions, such as the above-mentioned Darling and One Eye Red, a comedy entitled Wonderful and Loved by All (Underbar och älskad av alla), and a dog cartoon, Rocky. No, he’s not a Swedish Lassie but a listless, arrogant, hip hop-loving and highly entertaining mongrel that’s been shambling around the pages of comic albums and strips for the past decade or so and is now making his debut as an animated 3D character both in the cinema and in short TV features. Originally a small-scale social commentary project, Rocky has now grown into a minor empire. Many can identify with creator Martin Kellerman’s wry portrayal of big-city life and cool bar scenes, and those who don’t would probably like to.

Wolf, a film on a controversial issue, directed by Daniel Alfredson.

The two films share the same approach in that they directly pinpoint the highly topical and very real identity problems associated with arriving in a new and totally strange country as an immigrant.

The same message can also be conveyed with music, as in Kidz in da Hood (Förortsungar)—an updated version of an old Swedish musical entitled “Guttersnipes” (Rännstensungar). The project originally sounded hopeless, since musicals were widely considered a dead horse in Sweden. But after the opening, the prophets of doom had to eat their words. Kidz in da Hood sold well and won several prizes at the Golden Beetle Gala (Guldbaggegalan), Sweden’s annual film awards ceremony.

And more musicals are on the way. Mani Masserat Agah, who made his directing debut with Ciao Bella, and who is well worth keeping an eye on, is planning what he describes as “a cross between Dirty Dancing and Brokeback Mountain.”

Stureplan in Stockholm—a small central square that has come to symbolize the capital’s bar and nightclub scene for high flyers—has suddenly become a popular setting for Swedish feature films. “Fast Cash” (Snabba cash), a crime novel about three young men involved in the drug trade in the shadows of Stureplan, was a surprise bestseller and is being adapted for the screen in 2008, while one of the most critically acclaimed Swedish films of 2007, Darling, describes the culture clash between an unemployed middle-aged man and a young woman from the Stureplan scene.

No, it’s not a love story. In gender-minded Swedish cinema, the cliché pairing of young woman and older man is no longer on the cards. Rather, it is a beauti-fully filmed, realistic account of the difficulty—per-haps even the impossibility—of connecting across both class and age lines. The film attracted attention not only because of its cinematic qualities, but also because it had previously been refused a production subsidy by the Swedish Film Institute3. Otherwise, the Swedish capital has figured little on the silver screen, at least in recent years.

Up until the mid-1990s, though, Swedish films were usually set in Stockholm, while the rest of the country played a subordinate role. But that decade also saw the beginnings of a campaign to establish

Michelle Meadows (top) as Eva, and Michael Segerström (bottom) as Bernhard, in Darling, directed by Johan Kling.

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Easily the most popular setting for Swedish films, however, has surely been the inner landscape, or more precisely, the place where existential stories about human relations are played out. Dramatists such as August Strindberg and Lars Norén, and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Jan Troell and Bo Widerberg, are among the leading storytellers of their age. All possess or possessed the kind of individualistic streak—and the refusal to compromise—that enabled them to reach slightly deeper and go slightly further than others. Later film-makers with the same maverick qualities include Björn Runge, Kristian Petri and others described below.

roy anderssonRoy Andersson may not be just out of the cradle—in fact he is now something of a veteran—but he is still

very much alive and kicking. His breakthrough came in 1970 with A Swedish Love Story (En kärleks- historia), a sensitive account of teenage love. Whereas that film took a fairly conventional approach to its subject, Andersson’s next, Giliap, was much more stylized and peculiar. Both audiences and critics, however, found little to like in this somewhat lugubrious relationship drama about a quartet of people in a restaurant in a small Swedish town.

Badly stung by the censure, Roy Andersson turned his back on feature films for a lengthy spell—all of 25 years—and instead went into commercials, at which he was highly successful. He used this genre to hone his own personal style to perfection: dry humor, meticulously prepared images, and pano-ramas of amateur actors with white-painted faces. Andersson made a triumphant comeback in 2000 with Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra

A Swedish Love Story, a classic by Roy Andersson, featuring Ann-Sofie Kylin as Annika and Rolf Sohlman as Pär.

thestory- tellersAs may now be apparent, Swedish cinema sometimes moves out into the street. On occasion, it even enters the realm of action and science fiction (more about that later), and in the 1960s and 1970s it rolled about in the bedroom—a period that enjoys a reputation greater than its actual impact.

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4 Approx. USD 9.4 billion or EUR 7.2 billion

a busy outfit with a staff of ten. Besides Östlund’s movies, Plattform has also produced Sweden’s first feature film shot entirely on a cell phone—An Extraordinary Study in Human Degradation, of which more later—and shows every sign of becoming increasingly influential in Swedish cinema.

aGnieszka LUkasiakAgnieszka Lukasiak arrived in Sweden from Poland as a political refugee in 1984. She first came to the attention of Swedish audiences as a skilled, uncom-promising documentary filmmaker with Forgotten (Bortglömda), which describes the tough lives of two young Polish women in a Poland where everything is

for sale and nothing is worth anything anymore. Agnieszka Lukasiak deliberately broke with the (misguided) convention that says documentaries should only observe and document events, not influence and stage them. Insisting that objectivity is an illusion, she dramatized scenes that, she argued, would have taken place anyway.

With a passion for social justice equaled only by her irrepressible energy, Agnieszka Lukasiak has also produced the documentary Algeria: The Name-less War (Algeria). This is a very personal film that shows us both how the director herself experienced the country and how young people go about their lives in the shadow of the civil war. She is currently working with her first feature film, as yet untitled.

An Extraordinary Study in Human Degradation, shot on a cell phone by Patrik Eriksson, who also plays the lead.

våningen), which won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes. The film is a political commentary on a Sweden in which people have difficulty communicating and market forces govern their lives—all delivered with Roy Andersson’s special brand of laconic humor.

It took him “only” seven years to come up with his next film, You, the Living (Du levande). Here, too, Andersson uses his closely detailed imagery and his special blend of existentialism and humor, although this time adopting a slightly lighter tone.

LUkas MoodyssonLike Ingmar Bergman, Moodysson is a unique auteur who goes his own way. His breakthrough came in 1988 with his first feature film, Show Me Love, about a lesbian affair between two young girls. It no longer seems particularly controversial, and it tells its story in a simple, straightforward way, but Moodysson’s subsequent offerings would show that he is as non-conformist as a filmmaker as he used to be as a poet—a genre in which he was relatively well-known in Sweden before switching to cinema.

Moodysson has had the courage to step back—he has not walked the familiar path of small-time art film to big-time movie. Instead, he has taken the hard, uncomfortable road, emphasizing small scale and a more exclusive approach. As for instance in the brutal A Hole in My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta), filmed in a closed-off, seedy environment where two men and a woman act out their fears and fantasies with each other while shooting a porno movie.

Or as in Lilya 4-Ever, where Moodysson describes the tragic fate of a Russian girl who is first aban-doned by her mother and then forced into prostitution in Sweden. The film was widely acclaimed for its

realistic account of human trafficking and what it entails for the victim.

After these two films, Moodysson stepped back even further and offered audiences what can best be described as a visual stream of consciousness in Container. Few people bought tickets, very few, which surprised neither the cinema owners nor the director—but the film was nevertheless something of an ideological triumph.

In the autumn of 2008, Moodysson is once more in the public eye, this time with Mammoth, which by Swedish standards has an enormous budget, total- ing SEK 70 million4. The movie was shot in a number of different countries and the cast includes internationally known actors.

rUben ÖsTLUndRuben Östlund is a relative newcomer, but, like Roy Andersson, has stubbornly ignored the usual funding sources and gone his own way. After a number of prizewinning short films, including Autobiographical Scene Number 6882 (Scen nr. 6882 ur mitt liv), he made his full-length movie debut with The Guitar Mongoloid (Gitarrmongot), the story of a group of odd characters in Gothenburg. As unusual as it is well made, this is a semi-documentary built on the emotions rather than on classic dramatic compo-sition. Östlund finished his second feature film, Involuntary (De ofrivilliga), described as “a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy” just in time for the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed in the Un Certain Regard category.

Ruben Östlund is part owner of the Plattform production company, which has grown rapidly from a two-man venture (Östlund and Erik Hemmendorf) into

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screen phenomenon, family life, it’s no surprise audiences flocked to see it.

Family ties and love relationships were also the theme of Blom’s second feature film, Nina Frisk, about an air hostess searching for happiness and peace of mind. Maria Blom combines humor with a deep un-derstanding of people’s desires, dreams and needs.

The summer of 2008 saw the arrival of what was actually her first film, Fishy, which had been put on ice to make way for Dalecarlians but was now consid-ered worth distributing.

Josef faresJosef Fares is a highly talented director and also one of the most successful Swedish filmmakers of the past decade. His breakthrough came with his very first film, Jalla! Jalla!—a lively comedy about love across the integration border—which he followed up with a farcical police comedy, Kopps.

While he likes to talk about his great passion for action and the martial arts in cinema, he has yet to make a full-length film (despite countless short ones) in this genre. On the contrary, his later efforts have revealed a more serious side. Fares emigrated to Sweden from Lebanon, and Zozo is partly auto-biographical, describing a boy’s flight from the civil war in Beirut to Sweden, while his latest film, Leo, is a grim drama about street violence and its dire consequences.

Josef Fares’ next film is described as a romantic comedy.

Imad Creidi in the title role of Zozo, from 2005, directed by Josef Fares.

My Bodell in Fishy, directed by Maria Blom.

Jens JonssonJens Jonsson made his directorial film debut in 2007 with The King of Ping Pong (Pingpong-kingen). After already having made numerous short films—including Fragile, Reparation and Brother of Mine (Bror min)—many of which have won awards at Swedish and foreign film festivals, and also having directed a TV series, Good Morning, Children (God morgon alla barn), and written the screenplay for Ciao Bella (see above), Jens Jonsson was probably the best-qualified newcomer ever to have reached a Swedish movie set.

The King of Ping Pong, about a bullied young boy in northernmost Sweden, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. (despite the fact that it includes an American flag with the word “fuck” on it, which riled some of the Sundance audience), and showed that Jonsson was as comfortable with the full-length format as with the short.

Trained at both design school and film school, Jens Jonsson always creates strange and beautiful, toned-down worlds of his own in his narratives. Forthcoming projects include a relationship drama, Rational Solution (De rationella), for which Jonsson has written the screenplay. The director is Jörgen Bergmark.

Maria bLoMMaria Blom is both a dramatist and a theater director. In 2004, she filmed her own play, Dalecarlians (Masjävlar), which exploits the town-country dicho-tomy—a recurring theme in Swedish cinema. Since this comedy also centers around another popular

sWedes in HoLLyWood

1 Lasse Hallström. Director. The Swede with the best record in the U.S. After a number of successful Swedish movies, particularly My Life as a Dog (Mitt liv som hund), which was nominated for two Academy Awards in 1985, he crossed the Atlantic. American debut: Once Around. Selection of other titles: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Shipping News, Casanova and The Hoax.

1 Mikael Håfström. Director. Based in the U.K. but makes films for Hollywood and the Weinstein brothers. Titles: Derailed, 1408 and (coming) Shanghai.

1 Johan Renck. One-time video director. Feature film debut in 2008 with Downloading Nancy. Listed as one of movie magazine Variety’s top ten directors to watch out for.

1 Jonas Åkerlund. Music video director who has worked with Madonna, U2 and Metallica. Two feature films: Spun and (coming) The Horsemen.

1 Stellan Skarsgård. Actor. Often in action. Selection of titles: The Exorcist: The Beginning, Mamma Mia!, Pirates of the Caribbean.

1 Peter Stormare. Actor. Frequent participant in movies and TV series, from Seinfeld to Constantine.

1 Lena Olin. Actress. Selection of titles: Havana, Casanova, The Ninth Gate.

1 Pernilla August. Actress. Darth Vader’s mother in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones.

1 Per Hallberg. Sound editor. Two Oscar statuettes, for Braveheart and The Bourne Ultimatum.

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(see above), and their collabora-tion is still continuing. She also produced Falkenberg Farewell (Farväl Falkenberg), an account of small-town lives in mental turmoil. Directed by Jesper Granslandt, the movie was almost universally ac-claimed. The dynamic duo Anna Anthony & Josef Fares have a new film in the pipeline.

HeLen aHLssonThe Tre Vänner (“Three Friends”) production company has been operating since 1995, and was

started by three scriptwriters who wanted to have a greater say in how their work was treated. The circle of friends has now widened, and one of the latest additions is Helen Ahlsson. She made her de-but as a feature film producer with the documentary The Armwrestler from Solitude (Armbryterskan från Ensamheten), followed in 2007 by the feature film That Special Sum-mer (Kid Svensk).

Helen Ahlsson now has three projects under way: a documen-tary, The New Era (Den nya tiden), and two feature films, A

Simpler Life (Ett enklare liv) and The Loved One (Den älskade). The latter is described as a movie about passion, music, class, iden-tity and dreams, and the discrep-ancy between what we want to be and what we are. The director is Lisa Langseth.

Q&A with Helen Ahlsson;

What’s the gender equality situation in the industry nowadays?“We have a long way to go. Men are still the norm, both in society and in the movie industry. Things have improved, of course, but this is mostly because the industry has grown—there are many more pro-duction companies nowadays.”

What makes a good producer?“There’s no rulebook to follow, so you have to find your own way. But OK—incredible stamina and stubbornness, a desire to say something, to reach out.”

That’s usually the kind of thing directors and script-writers say. Aren’t producers supposed to be hard-nosed number crunchers whose job is to keep artists’ feet on the ground…?“I’ve never embraced that role. I take a long-term approach, work-ing with a small band of very exciting artists. We explore together, starting with short films and going on from there.”

Producer Anna Anthony.

In 2005, 20 percent of Swedish directors were women and in 2007 about 35 percent—not far off the 40 percent target set by the Swedish Film Institute for the next few years; however, figures for the first six months of 2008 show a drop in women directors to 25 per-cent. On the other hand, the basis for this figure is limited, since far fewer films opened in the spring of 2008 than in the same period in previous years.

In recent years, too, quite a number of creative women film producers have emerged. Media

coverage has sometimes given the impression that this occu-pation is dominated by women nowadays, but in fact the figures for producers are about the same as for directors and scriptwriters.

It is clear, however, that an un-usually large number of talented and successful women producers have entered the profession in recent years, and all have made their mark by focusing on content rather than just funding. Among them are Anna Croneman at Bob Film, Helena Danielsson at Hepp Film, and those described below.

the produ-cersIn Sweden, film directing is largely a male pursuit. This seems a paradox, given that the gender equality perspective has been acquiring ever-greater prominence in the Swedish film indus-try. The proportion of women in leading positions has improved slightly over the past few years, though.

anna anTHonyPerhaps the best qualified among the new generation of creative producers is Anna Anthony, whose career got off to a flying start when she began working for the suc-cessful Memfis Film production company under the industry’s leading producer of modern times, Lars Jönsson (who drew Moodysson the film genius out of Moodysson the poet).

Anna Anthony quickly took on and supervised the career of one of the most promising young direc-tors in Swedish cinema, Josef Fares

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she gets a major film role. This is true of Sofia Ledarp, who, despite having trod the boards for fifteen years, seemed to pop up from nowhere in 2007 to play the female lead in Åke Sandgren’s relationship drama To Love Someone (Den man älskar).

In the movie, she plays Lena, who has escaped from a destructive relationship with a violent man and is now living in a secure relationship with a new partner. One day, her old boyfriend gets in touch, and everyone’s nerves start to quiver. So do the audience’s—mainly as a result of Ledarp’s ability to subtly convey both emotional fragility and passion and aggression. She was rewarded with a Golden Beetle5 for the best female lead.

5 At Sweden’s equivalent of the annual ‘Oscar’ ceremony, prizes in the form of a gilded beetle are awarded for outstanding achievements in Swedish cinema.

Patrik, 1.5, starring Gustaf Skarsgård, Torkel Petersson and Tom Ljungman. Director Ella Lemhagen.

the actorsWhile this may not be true of all of Sweden’s many actors, it is an apt description of leading names such as Stellan Skarsgård, Mikael Persbrandt, Michael Nyqvist, Pernilla August, Marie Richardson, Lena Endre, Reine Brynolfsson, Tuva Novotny and many others, including the following.

GUsTaf skarsGårdOriginally known as one of the two sons who followed international star Stellan Skarsgård into acting, Gustaf Skarsgård has shown in recent years that he is well equipped to carve out a career of his own. He first appeared on the big screen in 1989, in the spy movie Code Name Coq Rouge (Täcknamn Cog Rouge), playing his father’s eight-year-old nephew.

Not surprisingly, this was followed by a lengthy break. In 2003, he returned with a bang in the

Oscar-nominated movie Evil (Ondskan, directed by Mikael Håfström), playing a sadistic upper-class pupil at a boarding school.

Since then, things have moved fast, and Gustaf Skarsgård has been increasingly in the public eye. As an actor, he has an intensity and a fierce presence that has caused a growing number of directors to seek his services. In 2008 alone, he can be seen in Iscariot—Two Brothers, One Debt (Iskariot – två bröder, en skuld), Arn—The Knight Templar (Arn – Tempelriddaren), Arn—The Kingdom at Road’s End (Arn – Riket vid vägens slut), and Patrik, Age 1.5 (Patrik 1,5). And further films are in the works.

sofia LedarpNo matter how long and hard an actress has worked in theater, she is considered a new name as soon as

When Danish director Simon Staho was asked why he works almost exclusively with Swedish actors, he re-plied, “They act as though their lives depended on it.”

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Sofia Ledarp is still active on stage, currently at the Stockholm City Theater, and can also be seen in two different TV series, Miscarriage of Justice (Oskyldigt dömd) and The Witches’ Dance (Häxdansen).

sofia HeLinSofia Helin has been active on both big screen and small since 1996, but only became a house-hold name when she appeared in Maria Blom’s popular movie Dalecarlians, which paints an entertaining and easily accessible picture of the classic town–country conflict.

Sofia Helin is best known for her leading part in the gargantuan Swedish movie project centering on the crusading knight templar

Arn Magnusson (more about this later), but it was primarily in Maria Blom’s comedies—both Dalecarlians and Nina Frisk—that she had the chance to display her full range of talents. The two roles are totally different but both are informed at heart by a sense of compassion that Sofia Helin brings out and sustains admira-bly. She also performs in the two Arn movies (see above) and in the coming title Metropia.

MaGnUs krepperMagnus Krepper has been around for some time and has consider-ably more experience than the above, but has yet to achieve the breakthrough he deserves with his energetic, intense style of acting. He swings freely between genres

and roles, instilling each character with the same blend of strength and vulnerability, and often—in particular—with a repulsive but suggestive brutality. The latter quality earned him a Golden Beetle award for his portrait of a drug dealer in Björn Runge’s hell-ish drama Mouth to Mouth (Mun mot mun).

Krepper has had few leading roles. Rather, he is usually seen in catalytic supporting roles that move the plot forward and give it a new twist. Besides Mouth to Mouth, his best-known perfor-mances have been in Daybreak (Om jag vänder mig om), again with Runge’s script and direction, The Cracks in the Wall (Sprickorna i muren), based on a novel by Lars Gustafsson, and the TV series The Confession (Bekännelsen).

Daniel Götschenhjelm and Sofia Helin in the 2007 comedy Nina Frisk, directed by Maria Blom.

doCUMenTariesSwedish documentaries have long been going out into the world to report on it. A century ago, Prince Wilhelm embarked on just such an expedition, and although his films are scarcely palatable today, given their colonialist perspective, they heralded the many forays abroad that Swedish documentarians would make in future years.

The 1960s and 1970s brought us prominent figures such as Arne Sucksdorff (My Home Is Copacabana), and film reports on the outside world culminated during these politically oriented decades. Documen-taries with a global perspective are still a thriving industry today, however.

The foremost representative of the genre is currently the Atmo Media Network. A production company founded in 2000 by, among others, two filmmakers well established in Sweden, Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh, it has won many awards.

Atmo has produced political, aesthetically sophisti-cated and prizewinning documentaries such as Surplus (about global consumerism), Gitmo—The New Rules of War (Gitmo – Krigets nya spelregler, about the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba) and Sacrificio (about Che Guevara).

The next film from Italian-born Gandini will be Italy in the Year Zero (Italien år noll), while Tarik Saleh will be back in 2009 with an ambitious project

genres

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Gitmo, a documentary from 2006 on the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, by Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh of the Atmo Media Network.

entitled Metropia—a dystopian computer animation of a dilapidated and totalitarian EU zone. Two of the voices are by American stars Vincent Gallo and Juliette Lewis.

The Atmo stable also includes one of Sweden’s most creative and ingenious editors and short-film makers, Johan Söderberg. He was responsible for the globally acclaimed music video showing George W. Bush and Tony Blair singing a duet, My Love, which was spread via the internet and is still accessible on YouTube.

Like in most countries, the documentary camera in Sweden focuses principally on the domestic scene, however. Here, veterans such as Stefan Jarl and Rainer Hartleb have ruled the roost, each producing an ambitious series of films that attracted big audiences. In what is known as his mods trilogy—They Call Us Misfits (De kallar oss mods), A Decent Life (Ett anständigt liv) and Generation to Generation (Det sociala arvet)—Jarl monitors his protagonists’ lives over a 25-year period, while Hartleb’s six films about

children growing into adulthood in the Stockholm suburb of Jordbro extends over 35 years.

Projects of this magnitude and duration have ne-ver been seen since, but the same spirit of inquiry and impassioned social commentary is evident in the work of people like David Aronowitsch and Hanna Heilborn, who produce touching and disturb-ing animated documentaries, Nahid Persson, maker of a widely acclaimed 2004 film about the situation of prostitutes in Iran, Prostitution: Behind the Veil (Prostitution bakom slöjan), and Fredrik von Krusenstjerna, who recently examined the bizarrely corrupt Polish funeral industry in Necrobusiness.

Tove Torbiörnsson is the Swedish Film Institute’s documentary film consultant. She was asked:

How is Swedish documentary film doing these days?“It’s doing very well for a small country like ours. It occupies a strong position both here and in the world at large. Documentary films are a visual interpreta-tion of how directors experience the world. They’re a unique form of narration based on the unknown, on antagonisms and conflicts, on frictions, and they reflect a deep yearning and desire to grasp the com-plexity of human life.”

What is the mission of documentary film?“I believe documentaries can gauge the extent to which culture and democracy are alive and flourish- ing in a given country. They don’t always have an immediate impact, but lead to changes that, while not perhaps quantifiable in terms of practical politics, nevertheless lodge in viewers’ minds and open up new

perspectives. Documentaries work at both the societal and the individual level.”

And the future?“When I began as a consultant, I sought a daring approach to form, a high degree of relevance, and narrative experimentation. This is something I think has developed. My film horizon extends two years into the future, and I think the prospects are good, really good. Things are very promising.”

Is there anyone in particular you’re looking forward to?

“There are quite a few to choose from, but Twin Brothers (Pangpang-bröder) is one of my favorites. Axel Danielson has followed his nephews, two twin boys, one of whom is a little person, throughout their childhood—with all that it means in terms of rivalry, brotherhood and identification. It’s a powerful and very visual film that really gets to you. Another favor-ite is Babak Najafi. He’s definitely one of the best.”

To say Najafi achieved a breakthrough with his short film Elixir would be an exaggeration—as we all know, it’s not easy to make a name for yourself with shorts—but this dryly humorous story of a group of young immigrants who get hold of a mysterious potion that turns whoever drinks it into an ethnic Swede (in this case a fully integrated immigrant with blond hair and a bit of a wimpy personality) at least brought him to the attention of the industry.

Elixir was a fictitious piece, but it said more about feelings of exclusion—and for that matter about latent racism—than ten academic theses on the subject. Otherwise, Babak Najafi has mainly produced

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documentaries, ranging over a broad spectrum, from children at risk in his native country, Iran, to a por-trait of a homosexual man and his beloved bulldog.

Najafi is attracting more and more attention. At present, he is working on a documentary that will be one of a portrait series about people living in society’s backyard. He is definitely a name to watch out for.

very MovinG piCTUres“I’m never going to use ordinary film again,” cried that old aesthete David Lynch exultantly after shoot-ing Inland Empire on digital video, DV.

While there are still many who are not as enthu-siastic, and who argue that DV will never be able to deliver the same color, depth and focus as the celluloid film of old, the technology is nevertheless gaining ground in Sweden. Above all, it represents

a much cheaper and more manageable approach to filmmaking for young newcomers seeking to gain a foothold in cinema.

Jesper Ganslandt is one such newcomer. His movie, Falkenberg Farewell, caused some old aesthetes to turn up their noses, but many others hailed it. In principle, he filmed and directed his own life—freely interpreted, of course—as a young man in a sleepy small town. The film came to symbolize alienation and existential disorientation among young men in Sweden in general, and appealed to many who saw it.

Hate Gothenburg (Hata Göteborg), another film on a shoestring budget featuring a shaky camera and tormented youth, has the same kind of narrative passion and presence. Robert Lillhonga will be in demand as a director in the future as well.

Those who turn up their noses at films where the camera is never still and focus is not always an issue are hardly likely to enjoy the next trend—the cell

Hidden (Gömd), short animated documentary from 2002, by Hanna Heilborn, David Aronowitsch and Mats Johansson.

Ten sWedisH Movies yoU sHoULd see before yoU die

1. Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander, 1982), by Ingmar Bergman. Epic family drama based on the director’s own childhood.

2. Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973), by Ingmar Bergman. Rugged relationship drama.

3. Raven’s End (Kvarteret Korpen, 1963), by Bo Widerberg. Vibrant working-class tale with strong performances.

4. Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), by Roy Andersson. Dark but entertaining social panorama.

5. The Man on the Roof (Mannen på taket, 1976), by Bo Widerberg. Sweden’s all-time best crime thriller.

6. Four Shades of Brown (Fyra nyanser av brunt, 2004), by Tomas Alfredson. Dark and satirical relationship drama.

7. Lilya 4-ever (Lilja 4-ever, 2002), by Lukas Moodysson. In-your-face human trafficking drama.

8. Il Capitano (1991), by Jan Troell. Strong depiction of a real-life murder case.

9. The Laser Man (Lasermannen, 2005), by Mikael Marcimain. TV mini-series about a traumatic social event in Sweden.

10. Torment (Hets, 1944), by Alf Sjöberg. Classic on the theme of young man versus sadistic teacher named Caligula. (Script by Ingmar Bergman.)

Fanny och Alexander, one of Ingmar Bergman’s best-loved works. Alexander is played by Bertil Guve and Fanny by Pernilla Allwin.

Subway choir in Songs from the Second Floor, directed by Roy Andersson.

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phone movie, which makes DVs look like a miracle of visual accomplishment.

The summer of 2008 saw the arrival in public of the first feature film shot on a private cell phone: An Extraordinary Study in Human Degradation. Patrik Eriksson has documented his own nervous break-down after his girlfriend left him—and the result is nothing if not intimately self-revealing. The film has also received plenty of media coverage.

But it is not exactly new. Self-scrutinizing diary films—preferably shot with a shaky hand camera, documentary-style—are now as common as sliced bread. This of course is due to the mass break- through of digital video (suddenly, everyone can shoot film indiscriminately and select their images in the editing room, i.e., the computer), but psychologically speaking, it could also be due to the fact that in a society where success is everything, confessed weak-

nesses have come to be regarded as something exotic and titillating.

Dirty Diaries is another cell phone project, headed by director Mia Engberg, who frequently adopts queer and gender perspectives. This project, which has only just begun, involves women directors shoot-ing erotic short films with their phones. The only conditions are that all concerned must be over 18 years of age and that no one is hurt. Engberg’s aim is to redefine pornography and make it “queer, feminist and innovative.”

CoMedyÅsa-Nisse is a bumbling character who first ap- peared in comic strips and then arrived on the cinema screen in the 1930s and 1940s. This is ancient his-tory, of course, but his spirit has continued to hover

Mia Engberg, director of the Dirty Diaries project.

over subsequent Swedish efforts to entertain cinema audiences. The movie Who Pulled the Plug? (Göta Kanal, and its sequel—a third is in the pipeline), a comic farce about a boat race on Sweden’s longest canal, is perhaps the best example of this particular category.

But there are others who have kept audiences laughing by taking a different approach. In recent decades, Måns Herngren and Hannes Holm have delivered a number of witty reflections on human relationships. Their principal asset is that, like other good storytellers, they write what they know. From their debut with Adam & Eve (Adam & Eva) to their latest premiere, Wonderful and Loved by All, the two have mirrored their own lives and the lives of those around them, creating comedies that many people can identify with. Their next film (about a male synchronized swimming team) suggests however that they may be taking a break from self-reflection.

Another representative of the same idiom is Kil-linggänget (The Goat Kids’ Gang), a group of comic actors and stand-up comedians who excelled in iron-ic and black humor in a series of popular TV shows. They have provided some of the funniest and most sharply observed moments in Swedish cinema and TV, not least in their feature film Screwed in Tallinn (Torsk på Tallinn), in which a group of men—all losers of one kind or another—travel to the Estonian capital to meet women eager to wed.

The comedy group’s greatest triumph, however, may have been the screenplay they wrote for one of the most ambitious, strange and demanding exer-cises in dark Swedish drama to have appeared in recent years: Four Shades of Brown (Fyra nyanser av brunt). The film offered an introspective panorama of a clean and polished Sweden with a neurotic,

seething inner life. The singular nature of this work must also be attributed in great measure to director Tomas Alfredson.

In Killinggänget’s films, Alfredson displays a unique ability to peer deep into the human soul. But he also has no problem about striking out on his own. In adapting the Swedish bestselling novel Let the Right One In for the screen, his clear, understated narrative style enabled him to remain true to the spirit of the original. This tale of exclu-sion, focusing on a young boy’s relationship with a vampire (!), may not exactly be a comedy, but it was edifying to see how Alfredson did the well-written book on which it is based full justice. More about this film later.

CriMe MoviesAnyone seeking to understand Sweden on the basis of our output of popular films might well conclude that our relatively small population is due to the fact that we keep murdering one another. Brutal crime movies are so ubiquitous in Sweden nowadays that it sometimes seems we own a franchise on them.

The longest-running and most popular body of work so far is the series about the Stockholm-based police detective Martin Beck. To date, it encompasses 30 full-length episodes, including the two films from Bo Widerberg described below. Some of the episodes were made for cinema, but most were shot directly for DVD. The first six were based on a well-known series of crime novels by Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö, while the rest were loosely based on the same characters. Mikael Persbrandt, the biggest name in the series, plays Beck’s boorish lieutenant, Gunvald Larsson, and promised after the 24th episode

28 29

that he would now put the role behind him. For a long while he seemed to have done so, but in early 2008 plans for two more films were revealed.

Shortly after, it became clear that a further 13 movies featuring police detective Kurt Wallander are in the making. Wallander already has 22 films to his credit, so he is destined to overtake Beck in terms of exposure. All the episodes for both big screen and small about the disillusioned policeman from Ystad in southern Sweden are based on the novels by Henning Mankell, with titles such as The White Lioness (Den vita lejoninnan), Before the Frost (Innan frosten) and Mastermind.

Other top police of book fame who have found their way onto the screen include Van Veeteren (from the Håkan Nesser thrillers), who operates in a fictitious European city called Maardam, and martial arts

doMesTiC oUTpUTSwedes are keener to watch Swedish movies than Norwegians are to watch Norwegian movies. Of all cinema tickets sold in Sweden in 2007, 21.6 percent were for domestic films, while in Norway the corresponding figure was 16.0 percent. But we are of course far outstripped by the more patriotic French, who top the European table: in France, domestic cinema has a market share of no less than 36.5 percent.

Source: Swedish Film Institute

Angela Kovács as detective Irene Huss in The Broken Tang Horse (Den krossade tanghästen) from 2008. Director Martin Asphaug.

expert Irene Huss (created by Helene Tursten). And more will doubtless be coming.

The two projects emphasize quantity, as we can see, and many would argue that quality has suffered as a result. Some of the works, however, have been of a high standard, and a couple were exceptionally good: The Man on the Roof (Mannen på taket) and The Man from Majorca (Mannen från Mallorca), both presided over by one of Sweden’s leading directors, Bo Widerberg.

Horror and speCiaL effeCTsMaking horror and science fiction films is a costly business, and since Sweden is a small country with a limited catchment area, this type of genre movie has long been on the decline.

In recent years, however, some ambitious efforts have been made to broaden the range of Swedish cinema. In 2005, Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein came onto the sci-fi scene with an action film entitled Storm, an agreeable and largely successful mix of TV game, thriller and Matrix, with a touch of Freudian therapy.

There have been a number of less successful ventures, too, such as the vampire slasher Frostbite (Frostbiten)—although it undoubtedly had certain technical qualities, such as the makeup and computer-generated imagery (CGI). The production company responsible for these, Fido Film, won a prize for its efforts at the Scream Feast, a U.S. festival for horror and science fiction movies. Fido also helped director Tomas Alfredson inject life into the literary best-seller Let the Right One In, another discourse on nocturnal bloodsuckers.

Rather than simply chilling audiences, the film

The Fido Film production company was awarded a prize for the special effects in Frostbite at the 2008 Scream Feast in Los Angeles.

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version is something as rare as a sensitive and romantic vampire film in a suburban setting. It opened in the autumn of 2008, but was previewed earlier in the year at the Göteborg International Film Festival, where it won well-deserved awards both for the film as such and for the photography. It has also attracted attention in the U.S., and film companies have bought the rights to an American and a British version.

John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, was almost as successful with another, even more unusual creature from the Swedish narrative tradition, the zombie. In Handling the Undead (Hanteringen av odöda), as in his vam-pire novel, Lindqvist adopts an existential, human perspective on the inhuman, which doesn’t mean there are not plenty of menacing undead staggering around. In fact, there are hordes of them.

How this is to be presented on screen without being embarrassing we have yet to learn, but we do know that the task has been entrusted to a talented direc-tor: Kristian Petri. Petri has previously made both thoughtful, perceptive films about human relations—such as Between Summers (Sommaren) and Details (Details)—and what might best be described as poetic documentaries. His job now is to bring out the distinctive qualities of this zombie movie.

Petri has previously admitted to viewing the task with a certain amount of trepidation: “There’s really nothing more silly and ridiculous than tot-tering screen zombies. Which is why this is such an exciting challenge. I’m going to try to revitalize the genre—to give the undead more dignity.”

Certain scenes in the book are causing him par-

ticular concern. “Like the one where the zombies dance in a circle in the moonlight. That could take silliness to new heights!”

The film is scheduled to reach cinemas in 2009 at the earliest.

fido fiLMThomas Deutschmann is a producer with the above-mentioned Fido Film, a special effects company spe-cializing in both physical and digital effects. Here, he talks about computer-generated imagery (CGI):

Are we good at special effects in Sweden?“Where makeup’s concerned, we have a few people who are among the best there is, but no single company in Sweden can compete with the physical effects companies you find in many other European countries.

“We’re OK for new talent—the attribute production course in Skellefteå in northern Sweden is a great help in this respect—but that section of the industry has difficulty moving up a gear since international jobs are hard to find. For practical reasons, film companies usually like to have physical effects people close at hand.

“Right now we’re doing makeup jobs for Norway and another physical job for a feature film in the Netherlands, but in both cases we got the work because we’re also doing digital effects for these projects.

“Since we can supply artists of the very highest class, Sweden has quite a fantastic potential, on the CGI side, too. What we produce here at home often amazes big international studios when they

MosTLy aMeriCan MoviesIn Sweden, like in most other countries, people prefer to watch American cinema. Despite our closer cultural and geographical proximity to the European continent, we watch very few movies from that part of the world.

PRINCIPAL COUNTRY OF PRODUCTION SHARE OF VISITS

USA 64.59%Sweden 21.55%U.K. 8.26%France 2.23%Germany 1.14%Spain 0.56%Denmark 0.40%Norway 0.26%Mexico 0.24%Japan 0.13%

Source: Swedish Film Institute

hear what few resources we’ve had at our disposal.“I’ve met the top executives at Framestore, Double

Negative, Glassworks and MPC in London (who work with Narnia, Harry Potter and others), and all have been full of praise for what we do. Realistic cats, wolves and other organic creatures are complicated things to tackle, and what we’ve managed to produce quickly and cheaply has impressed people. There are plenty of Swedes in London and they’re generally considered to be among the best in the business.”

Is yours a growing industry?“No, not particularly…for some reason, no studio in Sweden has managed to harness the available talent properly. We’re losing people all the time to companies

abroad, and although some are now returning home there simply isn’t a studio in Sweden capable of com-peting with the big international companies.

“It’s up to us in Sweden to acknowledge our poten-tial and dare to make the necessary investments. The ‘death of distance’ concept—which refers to the ease of linking together animators in different countries by means of high-speed digital transmission—is something we could take advantage of to a much greater extent.”

THe sWedisH kniGHTA project that is in total contrast to the above—in terms of both production conditions and content—is

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the screen adaptation of the popular books about Swedish crusader Arn Magnusson.

The Arn project was presented in 2006, and it is no exaggeration to say that many were skeptical about its chances. While the two films (and a coming TV series) are based on the bestselling suite of novels by popular author Jan Guillou, Swedish histor-ical adventure stories have never found much favor with home audiences, to put it mildly.

This time, however, the makers had something their predecessors never had—a great deal of money. With a budget of over SEK 200 million, the Arn project is by far the most ambitious venture in the history of Swedish filmmaking. The bulk of Sweden’s acting elite appear dressed in beards, coats of mail and elegant gowns, and everything is….well, large-scale, lavish and very reminiscent of American prototypes such as Kingdom of Heaven.

The movies describe how young Arn spends much of his 12th-century childhood at the Varnhem monastery in the province of Västergötland, learns languages and martial arts, and eventually departs as a crusader to the Holy Land, where he comes into conflict with the Saracen leader Saladin. Thus audiences are treated to an epic adventure story complete with battle scenes and romantic episodes, although the emphasis is on the latter.

The project has been both acclaimed and criti-cized (many feel the money could have been bet-ter spent on twenty “ordinary” films), but it has undoubtedly appealed to Swedish audiences. The first Arn film quickly exceeded its dream target of a million paying customers. The second in the series opened in the autumn of 2008. When released abroad in 2008/2009, the two films will have been edited down to one.

Joakim Nätterqvist in the title role of the 2007 megaproject Arn—The Knight Templar, directed by Dane Peter Flinth.

Given a population of just nine million, few movies are able to capture large audiences in Sweden, and those described as box-office hits have usually sold well under half a million tickets. On TV, however, a well-made and exciting series such as The Regicide (Kungamordet) can surpass that figure fairly easily.

The fact is that serious drama series like those we used to import (especially from Denmark) have appeared frequently in recent years. The Regicide centers on a power struggle within Sweden’s largest political party, the Social Democrats, but also has a secondary plot line about wife-beating—which struck such a chord among viewers that, on the day after the broadcast, women’s emergency shelters around Sweden were swamped with telephone calls from battered women.

Persecution of women is also a theme of the more light-hearted TV series The Witches’ Dance, set in a small Swedish town. It is about a women’s soccer team whose home playing field is a meadow where witches were burnt in the 17th century. The series was both well acted and entertaining, and each episode attracted around half a million viewers.

Other reality-based series that show the TV film genre is alive and well in Sweden are The Laser Man (Lasermannen), which tells the true story of a de-ranged racist who shot eleven persons in Stockholm in the early 1990s, and Rise Up! (Upp till kamp),

a drama about the rise and fall of the 1968 politi-cal movement and its accompanying music scene. Both were directed by Mikael Marcimain, currently described as the new savior of Swedish TV movie-making. Besides these two, he has also directed a popular thriller series, The Grave (Graven).

All the above series were produced by or for the Swedish public service company, Sveriges Television (SVT). Commercial channels such as TV3, TV4 and Kanal 5 have made some attempts to break into tele-vision drama, but without success—both audiences and critics have found them wanting.

tele-vision

Ruth Vega Fernandez in the 2007 TV series Rise Up!, directed by the new savior of Swedish television, Mikael Marcimain.

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The term “Swedish cinema” covers an extreme-ly wide range. From medieval action epics about the Swedish knight templar Arn and his holy crusade to Jerusalem, via contemporary takes on young immi-grants’ integration problems, to small, ambitious doc-umentaries about odd souls in Sweden’s backyard. Swedish horror and sci-fi movies have begun to take their first tottering steps, and the production of police and crime movies has virtually exploded in recent years—as a result of which we now export fictitious detective superintendents at the same rate as moose souvenirs and Dalecarlian wooden horses.

But all’s well that ends well—at least if one focuses

in conclu- sion

on the positive aspects of Swedish cinema production and on the filmmakers who are fired by passion, by a need to tell a story and by a conviction that movies are larger than life. But as in many other countries, the Swedish film industry suffers recurring crises, mainly due to a lack of funds—as always.

Looking on the bright side, however, this short-age of money has meant that new filmmakers are constantly emerging who show that it’s possible to write large on the screen using small means. Sweden’s many emerging film talents are proof that Swedish cinema is alive and well. And that it didn’t all end with Ingmar Bergman.

COLIN NUTLEY

MAGNUS KREPPER

MICHELLE W

ILLIA

MS

TUVA NOVOTNY

TARIK SALEH

& ERIK GANDINI

SOFIA LEDARP

ELLA LEMHAGEN

SOFIA H

ELIN

ROY ANDERSSON

36

UsefUL WebsiTesSwedish Film Institute: www.sfi.seIngmar Bergman Foundation: www.ingmarbergman.seGöteborg International Film Festival: www.filmfestival.orgStockholm International Film Festival: www.stockholmfilmfestival.seUppsala International Short Film Festival: www.shortfilmfestival.comList of Swedish Films (Swedish Film Institute): www.swedishfilm.orgSwedish Gore Film Society: swegore.wordpress.comRocky (the cartoon dog): www.rocky-digital.com

piCTUre CrediTsCover photo: Josef Fares: Emelie Asplund © Scanpix, Ingmar Bergman: Magnus Skoglöfp. 3 Malena Rydell © Scanpixp. 7 Jonas Jörneberg © Tre Vännerp. 8 John Hertov © SF filmp. 9 Aina Bye © Migma Film AB 2008. All rights reserved.p. 11 Walter Hirsch © Roy Andersson Filmproduktion ABp. 13 © Plattform Produktionp. 15 (top) Per-Anders Jörgensen © Memfis Filmp. 15 (bottom) © Memfis Filmp. 17 Sara Mac Key © Memfis Filmp. 19 Tomas Michaelsson © 2008 Filmlancep. 20 Per-Anders Jörgensen © Memfis Filmp. 22 © Atmop. 24 © Storyp. 25 (top) Arne Carlsson © 1982 AB Svensk Filmindustri, Svenska Filminstitutetp. 25 (bottom) © Studio 24p. 26 Marika Heidebäckp. 28 Alexandra Aristarhova © Nordisk filmp. 29 © Solid Entertainment / Fido Filmp. 32 Erik Aavatsmark © 2007 AB Svensk Filmindustri. All rights reserved.p. 33 Marcimain-van Hoytema © Sveriges Televisonp. 35 Colin Nutley © Tony Nutley, Sweetwater production AB, Magnus Krepper: Ola Kjelbye, Sofia Helin: Per-Anders Jörgensen © Memfis Film, Roy Andersson © Studio 24, Michelle Williams: Per-Anders Jörgensen © Memfis Film, Tarik Saleh & Erik Gandini: Magnus Reed © Atmo, Tuva Novotny: Peter Målqvist, Sofia Ledarp: Knut Koivisto, Ella Lemhagen: Anders Ryderling © SF film 2008