Folklore, Greta and the Contaminated Society – environmental themes in Swedish films
Karin Svensson, culture journalist and film critic
How is the environmental theme represented in Swedish film history? Karin Svensson takes a closer look.
It was arguably the least surprising news of 2019: climate activist Greta Thunberg will be the protagonist in an upcoming documentary. Her journey from lone school striker to world-famous environmental icon has everything a filmmaker could wish for – the personal difficulties that turn into triumph, the double-edged attention of admirers and online trolls, the girl with the braids who educates the world rulers in expensive suits. Director Nathan Grossman probably had no difficulty pitching the idea for Greta vs. the Climate, where he follows her on her journey.
We are in a flood of environmentally aware filmmaking. Around the world, film festivals are arranged with names such as Eco Film Fest (London) and Planet in Focus (Toronto), while Hollywood runs amok with bombastic stories of extreme weather and post-apocalyptic misery. In Sweden, the environmental threat is dealt with in low-key sci-fi for both adults and children. In Aniara (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, 2019), humanity leaves a no longer liveable planet with stormy seas and brown-burned land masses for a bleak life in space. In Alone in Space (Ted Kjellsson, 2018), a space engineer steals a spaceship to save her children from the impending disaster.
But films with environmental messages are not a new phenomenon, and certainly not in Sweden. The romanticism of the late 19th century and the passion for nature and folklore made a mark on the early Swedish films. In the newly restored Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919), Mauritz Stiller portrays nature’s indispensable beauty with the glow of a Greenpeace activist. When we first meet the farmer’s son Olof Koskela, he gets thoroughly exhilarated in a forest grove, talks about the happiness of being in the enchanted nature (“like in a castle”), and when his neighbour Annikki shows up in the grove, she instantly becomes his forest nymph.
When he later meets Kyllikki, as proud as “the wild foaming rapids”, his fate is sealed, but he does not realize it – not until he is confronted with the city’s dirt and shabbiness and promptly returns to the village, and into the forest.
Similar declarations of love for nature and criticism of the progress of modernity can be found in all of Swedish film history, from Victor Sjöström’s A Man There Was (1917) and Gustaf Edgren’s Rain Follows the Dew (1946), up to the 21st century films Burrowing (Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel, 2009) and Faro (Fredrik Edfeldt, 2013). The connection to folklore is particularly evident in films such as Trollsommar (‘Troll Summer’, Hans Dahlberg, 1980), where a family of trolls in the Dalecarlian woods quite cunningly sabotages the forest felling, and Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018), where the troll Eva prefers the companionship of animals over humans.
The more obviously political environmental film had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. In Grisjakten (‘The Pig Hunt’, 1970), Jonas Cornell explored how the soulless bureaucracy can contaminate our society in the story of the official who is commissioned to exterminate all pigs in Gotland. Deadline (Stellan Olsson, 1971) depicts the consequences of a poison attack on the idyllic seaside resort of Mölle in the south of Sweden. Stefan Jarl raged over human abuse on the landscape in the essay film Naturens hämnd (‘Nature’s Revenge’, 1983) and in Tong Tana – A Journey to the Heart of Borneo (Jan Röed and Fredrik von Krusenstjerna, 1989) we got to meet the people who are hit the hardest when the rainforest is pillaged.
But it is also possible to make comedies about the environmental threat. Tage Danielsson tackled tourism as environmental destruction in Äppelkriget (‘The Apple War’, 1971), where the rural municipality of Änglamark (loosely translated as Angel Land) would be transformed into a paved holiday paradise under the slogan “turning ancient countryside into future countryside” (exemplified by a stone circle where the stones have been turned into slot machines). But it’s not as smooth sailing as the municipal council has envisaged, as environmental activists get help from both the water spirit and the forest nymph. Their victory is celebrated with a picnic on the grass, accompanied by the music of Evert Taube.
And the question is what is most effective, if you really want to inspire the audience to action: to be intimidated by the threat of the world’s downfall or to be converted through beautiful pictures of what is in peril. A research study from 2018 shows that children who spend a lot of time in nature – who have been fascinated by bird nests and ant hills – were more likely than other children to grow up to be environmentally engaged adults. Mauritz Stiller knew what he was doing when he made Olof Koskela a tree hugger.
(published in Swedish in February 2020 and in English in May 2020, translation by Jan Lumholdt)
Swedish films with environmental themes - a selection listed chronologically
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The life and trials of ageing ex-sailor Terje at and on the stormy seas.
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This film was largely shot outside the studio, in real-life environments. The nature in the film plays a crucial role: the reproduction of the summer night’s light, for example, contributes to the film’s lyrical atmosphere, and the scene where lead Lars Hanson balances on a log down the rushing rapids has become a classic.
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A rural romantic drama set in Hälsingland province in the 1800s. The rapids play a central role as an ever-present drowning hazard.
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Hans Alfredson plays Cattle Agency Manager Lennart Siljeberg, who is tasked with exterminating all the pigs on the island of Gotland.
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An environmental horror film in which the idyllic beach at Mölle is polluted by a biological warfare agent following an explosion.
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Änglamark, the last song published by Evert Taube during his lifetime, carried Tage Danielsson’s politically founded environmental comedy forward. Danielsson received a Guldbagge Award for Best Director, Monica Zetterlund for Best Actress, and it also won Best Motion Picture.
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A family comes into contact with a troll in the countryside. They get to know the troll’s family, along with some of the other mythical creatures in the forest. They also become aware of the significance of forest felling.
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Master animator Per Åhlin transforms Shakespeare’s The Tempest into a struggle against environmental destruction, in this double Guldbagge Award winner (for Åhlin himself and composer Björn Isfält). On Captain Tree-stand’s cargo ship, evil weapons manufacturers Slug and Slagg come to the island of Melonia, the world’s last ever sliver of green oasis. They want to plunder Melonia’s riches, but face fierce resistance from the wizard Prospero, his daughter Miranda and albatross Ariel, who decide to rescue the slave children on the capitalists’ home island – the filthy Plutonia.
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Sago pudding, corruption and boiled boar combine in this documentary about deforestation in the Borneo rainforest where Bruno Manser, a young Swiss man, has decided to live a new life fighting for nature.
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In the same year that Al Gore explained the climate crisis with PowerPoint slides in An Inconvenient Truth, Swedish trio Michael Stenberg, Linus Torell and Johan Söderberg made this far more punk documentary about the consequences of global environmental disaster. With an aesthetic reminiscent of MTV and SVT show Kobra, the film combines serious expert interviews and frightening statistics (“the number of natural disaster has increased four-fold in the past 40 years”), with stories about the people and places hit hardest by the results of our unsustainable lifestyle.
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You don’t have to go all the way to the African savannah to make notable, exciting nature film – you can just step out into your garden. In this film, nature filmmaker Mikael Kristersson shows his own home’s garden, seen from the point of view of the cabbage butterfly, the blackbird, the great tit and the wasp. He takes his inspiration from such filmmakers as Fellini and Tarkovsky rather than traditional nature film, and people have a natural place in his works: “I’ve tried to reverse the perspectives, so that we are a species among other species,” as the director himself put it.
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David meets Goliath in this documentary by Fredrik Gertten, in which twelve workers in Nicaragua ask American lawyer Juan Domínguez to help them sue banana giant Dole Food Company. The company allegedly used a banned pesticide that made the workers sterile. “This is a legal thriller in documentary form, with the same suspense and high stakes as a John Grisham bestseller,” wrote SVT reviewer Göran Everdahl about the film, which even had a sequel (Big Boys Gone Bananas!*) about the legal aftermath when Dole sued the filmmakers.
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If Henry David Thoreau had set Walden in Falkenberg, this might be what it would have looked like. Fredrik Wenzel’s cinematography and Enok Enoksson’s music contributed to the high ratings and comments such as “insanely beautiful”.
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Drama where a father, wanted for murder, flees into the forest with his daughter. The film gave Matti Bye a Guldbagge Award for Best Original Music.
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International award winner and festival darling with border crossing sex-in-the-woods and trolls searching for their true identity.
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Dystopian arthouse sci-fi where the cargoship Aniara carries people to Mars when planet Earth has been devastated by environmental destruction. Based on the 103 songs long epos by Harry Martinson, with the same name. One of three films nominated in 2019 to be Swedens submission to the Oscars's category Best International Feature Film.
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Space adventure where two siblings and a friendly extra terrestrial leave planet Earth and embark on a search for a better life somewhere else.
