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CINEMA

Ten new (and old) Swedish films to add to your bucket list

Irish film writer Peter Larkin lists his top picks of movies screened at this year's Gothenburg Film Festival.

Published: 14 February 2017 14:28 CET
Ten new (and old) Swedish films to add to your bucket list
Still image from the movie Sami Blood. Photo: Gothenburg Film Festival

As a volunteer at the 40th Gothenburg Film Festival I heard that the film most audience members were eager to see was Sami Blood (Amanda Kernell, 2016). It was awarded the prize for Best Nordic Film at the festival's Dragon Awards, the largest film cash prize in the world.

It concerns the minority Sami people in northern Sweden in the 1930s and their struggles through life, focusing on one girl Ella-Marja (Lene Cecilia Sparrok), as she is cut off from society.

READ ALSO: 30 Swedish movies you must see before you die

Another Swedish film, Beyond Dreams, had its world premiere and received the Audience Award for Best Nordic film. It is a coming-of-age story set in modern Swedish suburbia. Both Sami Blood and Beyond Dreams feature stunning performances from ensemble casts and will have general Swedish releases in March. 

The Ex-wife is a comedy of manners about Swedish family life and all of the difficulties of taking care of children after a divorce; it receives a general Swedish release on February 17th.

The festival had a classics section which included The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström, 1921) directed by the acclaimed Victor Sjöström, also an actor who is perhaps best known to international audiences for playing the professor in Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957). The Phantom Carriage is said to have been a major influence for Bergman, particularly The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957) and also interestingly, Stanley Kubrick had the film in mind when he made The Shining (Kubrick, 1980). Screenings at Göteborgs Konserthus featured a live music performance of the film's score.
 
Also playing in the classics section in the beautiful one-screen cinema Capitol was The Secret Friend (Marie-Louise Ekman, 1990) which has been digitally restored by the Swedish Film Institute and shown in collaboration with Cinemateket. It is a film about anxiety and cross-dressing, featuring a wonderful central performance by Ernst-Hugo Järegård and a music score by Abba's Benny Andersson.
 

The critically acclaimed and popular Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) was also screened as part of the festival's Jubileumsretrospektiv. It was the first Swedish film I saw that wasn't a Bergman movie. I first saw the film nearly ten years ago upon its initial release in my home country of Ireland in 2009; it was sitting on the shelf of a local mainstream video rental chain.

The film concerns two 12 year old kids in Blackeberg, suburban Stockholm in 1981. The boy Oskar (Kåre Hendebrant) is being bullied at school; the girl Eli (Lina Leandersson) is in fact a 200 year old vampire. The Australian film critic Adrian Martin has said that the most important aspect of a filmmaker's brilliance is how he or she creates separate visual templates for day and night. The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999) is a great example of this and Alfredson in Let the Right One In (see trailer) uses sharp bright contrasts in the night scenes that give the film an almost hypnotic flair.

There was also great diversity in the films selected that were directed by women. A selection of last year's Swedish films such as Kiki (Sara Jordenö, 2016) and Alena (Daniel di Grado, 2016) were also in retrospective as well as many short films such as I Will Always Love You, Kingen (Amanda Kernell, 2016) and The Fire (Liselotte Wajstedt, 2016).

The Göteborg Film Festival proudly celebrated its 40th year in which 457 films were shown from 83 countries across 11 days. 2018’s festival promises to bring just as many joys and surprises.

Guest blog written by Peter Larkin. Read his blog here.

HISTORY

Do Taylor Swift’s ancestors really come from a small parish in rural Sweden?

A community history group has tried to get to the bottom of a persistent genealogy rumour surrounding US mega star Taylor Swift and a small parish in north-central Sweden.

Published: 15 May 2024 11:49 CEST
Do Taylor Swift's ancestors really come from a small parish in rural Sweden?

Lodged in the mountains between Östersund and Norway, Offerdal in the region of Jämtland is home to some 2,000 people. It may also be the ancestral home of Taylor Swift.

Or maybe not. It’s not entirely clear. Bear with us.

“It’s been written about in several newspapers since as long ago as 2014. Because specifically Offerdal and a village called Söderåsen are mentioned in those articles, we’ve been curious about this for a while,” Sara Swedenmark, chair of the Offerdal Community Association, told The Local.

READ ALSO:

When Swift decided to launch her Eras Tour in Sweden (she’s set to perform in Stockholm on May 17th-19th), the group decided to look into her possible connection with Offerdal, which is mentioned on several American genealogy sites, but always without reference to a source.

During their research, they found two people from the area who could possibly be related to Swift. One of them is Olof Thorsson, who is the main person rumoured to be one of her ancestors.

“We can see that there are people who connect them, but in one place the line is broken because there’s a man who married several times. So we haven’t found a direct line of descent, but we’re not saying it doesn’t exist. Because we’re talking about around 1,200 people in 400 years, there could be other possibilities,” said Swedenmark.

A church in the parish of Offerdal. Photo: Offerdal/Wikimedia Commons

Thorsson travelled with his family in 1641 to New Sweden – a Swedish colony in what today are Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland – on board the ship Kalmar Nyckel. He is said to have committed a crime in Sweden and was sent abroad for penal labour.

“We haven’t found which crime he allegedly committed, even though there are conviction records from this time, which makes us doubt whether he actually lived here,” said Swedenmark.

“Another person who was banished from the country around this time in Offerdal received it as punishment for having put witchcraft on the neighbour’s cattle.”

An oil painting by Jacob Hägg, depicting the ship Kalmar Nyckel. Photo: Sjöfartsmuséet/Wikimedia Commons

But they also found another possible connection with Swift: a man known as Jöns The Black Smith Andersson, his wife Maria and their daughter Brita, who travelled to New Sweden in 1654.

“There seem to be certain relations here via half siblings in the early 18th century,” said Swedenmark, urging readers to reach out if they have more information. “The Church of Sweden started keeping population records in the later half of the 17th century, so it’s not completely straightforward to track down roots from this time.”

So in other words, nothing concrete that confirms that Swift does indeed descend from Offerdal, and the parish is not the only place in the world that’s purportedly connected to the artist. Genealogy company Ancestry claims she’s related to the American poet Emily Dickinson, and according to My Heritage she’s also related to France’s King Louis XIV and US actor Johnny Depp.

Offerdal, by contrast, is rather less grand. But what might life have been like at the time?

“Offerdal in the 17th century was an uneasy place, because Jämtland was being torn between the Swedish king and the Danish-Norwegian king,” explained Swedenmark. “There were a lot of wars in close succession and farms were seized if the owner swore their allegiance to the ‘wrong’ king. There were around 30 villages and 600 people in the parish.”

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