Sweden - Heja Sverige

Light and Shadow or: The Downside of Being Exemplary

In Sweden there are beautiful people with golden hair and a harmonious complexion. They dress tastefully and they live in wooden cottages or in immaculate, light and spacious apartments with white hard wood floors. They are friendly towards each other and everybody else. At times they are a bit distanced, but they are always just. They listen to good music, their fathers enjoy several years of parental leave and they don’t mind paying their taxes. When it comes to the welfare state and pop music, Sweden appears to be a successful experiment in planned economics. (After all, they are the world’s greatest creators of pop music hits!). But just like assembling a bookshelf is never as easy as the manual makes it look, nations are never quite the way they seem, either. After all, with the midsummer sun shining all day and night, there are a lot of shadows, as well. And half a year of darkness may offer lots of time for the cinema, but it also tends to leave its mark on the mind and soul. In 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed that Sweden, with its »cradle-to-grave socialism«, had an abundance of nudity and sin as well as the highest alcohol and suicide rate in the world.

While this perceived downside of Swedish exemplariness instigates the resentment of American prudes, it also dampens the social envy of the rest of us. After all, Swedish short films come across all proper and ideal: There is lots of golden hair, golden bears, golden palms, golden humour and golden understatement. On the surface, the films distinguish themselves by their democratic heterogeneity in both form and content. But the abyss is only a blink away. One leitmotif, that we admittedly strengthened within our programme in a self-indulging manner, is the transgression of social norms and conventions. Borderlines, whether they are separating nature and culture or reality and fiction, recur throughout the programme. And hand in hand with the above mentioned music, there is of course a bit of good old Bergman wandering through the Swedish short film forests, eternally searching for his identity.

Sweden’s short film landscape of the last ten years is one of of the most flourishing, amazing and comprehensive ones in the whole world. Ambling through it offers plenty of light and dark joys, interrupted by an occasional appreciative and shocked shaking of the head. To be honest, lust and prejudice were among the guiding forces in our selection process. And you can win a birch, if you can find all the vices listed here. Ha det så kul!

Film selection Lina Paulsen, Stefanie Reis

Sweden - Heja Sverige