Here, There and Nowhere

Guest workers assisted in building Sweden in the latter part of the 20th century. Groups from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland, Turkey and other countries came to Sweden to find a better life. But unknown people who made up the silent majority of migrant workers in Sweden are rarely given much screen time in films, series and TV shows.

In this article [the full title of which is “Here, There and Nowhere – Sprawling Images of Guest Workers in Swedish Film”] I want to highlight a few films about migrant workers that paint a more vibrant and nuanced picture. It turns out – unsurprisingly – that it is harder to come up with unambiguous answers when people are depicted in their own right, rather than as static collectives.

The films that portray guest workers are quite different in nature. At times they are films d’auteur of high prestige, where dissidents are invited to Sweden to make quality film, such as Montenegro or Pigs and Pearls (Dušan Makavejev, 1981). Makavejev, the Yugoslavian dissident noted for controversial works like WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), which earned him persona non grata status in that country, made a film about Yugoslavian workers in Stockholm.

Montenegro would be the highest-earning film in Makavejev’s career. Set in Stockholm, the film is primarily about Marilyn Jordan from the US, who is married to Martin, a Swedish businessman. Their lives, which are permeated by boredom, change when they meet a young man called Montenegro, who works at a zoo. Martin goes away on a business trip, but Marilyn is stopped at border control and happens to meet two Yugoslavs, who take her to the Zanzi Bar nightclub, a place full of immigrants and suspected moonshine-making. Marilyn is attracted to Montenegro, has sex with him, and in the morning it turns out he has been stabbed. In the final scene, it is revealed Marilyn has not only killed Montenegro, but also poisoned her family.

In terms of atmosphere, colour and tone, the film is divided between the two worlds in which Marilyn exists. The calm, quiet, cold life of a ‘typical’ middle-class family is contrasted with a colourful, burlesque and incredibly exaggerated image of immigrant life in the isolated Yugoslavian ghetto in Zanzi Bar nightclub. One of the first times we see Yugoslavs, a man is injured – he has a knife in his forehead. The carnival-like Yugoslav life is depicted in a humorous way. Makavejev plays with stereotypes and exaggerates them, until they become a kind of ironic and distanced magical realism. In Montenegro, Makavejev plays with ingredients such as sex and death, without judgement or any claims of authenticity.

Montenegro can be viewed as a story about workers, but also as an allegory of the exile’s life Makavejev led during the 1970s and 1980s. The film can be seen as a depiction of the director’s own life – he was an emigrant who travelled around and had to take whatever work he could get – while he playfully paints a hyperbolic picture of a stereotyped world with intertextual nods to the quality European and Swedish films of the time, such as the choice of Erland Josephson as Martin, a clear reference to Ingmar Bergman’s television miniseries, Scenes from a Marriage (1973). Makavejev obviously regarded himself as a representative – but not for Sweden, but for the European art film of the time. The film happens to have been made in Sweden, but it doesn’t only look at the social conditions prevalent in that country at that point in time. Rather, it can be seen as a cautious metaphor for the different worlds in which Makavejev moved during that period.

Another, earlier depiction of the lives of guest workers can be found in the film dramatization of Theodor Kallifatides’ book “Utlänningar” (‘Foreigners’), which looks at the daily lives of Greek guest workers in Stockholm. The title of the film, Jag heter Stelios (‘My Name Is Stelios,’ 1972), has a clear communicator; a voice that distinguishes the main character from what can sometimes be perceived as a large, homogeneous group comprised of people whose only common identity is based on their mother tongue not being Swedish. Jag heter Stelios is about a young Greek guest worker and the Greek collective in which he lives. Stelios lives in Stockholm and tries to navigate his way through the new country. Like various other European films from the 1970s and 1980s, the film depicts situations that contain potential culture clashes. The majority population behaves in a way which at times seems confusing and incomprehensible when viewed from Stelios’ perspective. Sweden for Stelios is a promise, a hope, but also language courses, passive-aggressive shortcomings and caution. In quite a nuanced way, the film conveys that Sweden is also a country where many different immigrant groups are trying to understand each other and their new homeland. In one scene, people from different countries are sitting talking past each other, which in itself reveals that immigrants do not belong to a homogeneous group, but come from different places and have different experiences. The director Johan Bergenstråhle is naturalistic in his portrayal. The camera manages to capture the unspoken. Jag heter Stelios is a unique film where individuals are allowed to be just that, although the depiction of Sweden that Stelios encounters does at times seem like a caricature.

Made in Yugoslavia – Miko Lazić’s first feature – was released in 2005 and centres around Mihajlo Petrović, born and bred in Sweden of Yugoslav guest worker parents who came to Sweden in the 1960s. Because of the war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Mihajlo’s father Petar – after learning that their holiday home on the Adriatic coast of Croatia has been destroyed – has locked himself into the family’s garage in Stockholm so he can commit suicide. Mihajlo’s family gather to try and convince the disillusioned Petar to change his mind. Flashbacks to the Petrović family’s past history, both in Yugoslavia and Sweden, are interspersed with arguments and accusations that have led to the untenable situation in which the family now finds itself.

At first glance, Made in Yugoslavia is a film that readily fits into a stereotypical idea of stories about culture clashes. In simple terms, this could be called the guest worker’s nostalgic yearning for a home, for a place frozen in time that remains in the memory. But the situation is complicated by the fact that the nostalgia in the Petrović’s reminiscences is not based on memories, but rather dreams of the future. But Petar reaches the painful realization that what he has – more or less successfully – tried to build up, has been turned into ashes and painful memories, and not a hopeful future. The war is a brutal awakening for the Petrović family.

Lazić’s cinematic world is partly ‘made in Yugoslavia’. The entire cast – apart from the younger and older Mihajlo – are well-known Serbian actors. An interesting combination arises when iconic actors are put into a strange context, but also when Lazić, in portraying a collective, uses a metaphorical concept that was well tried and tested in the former Yugoslavia: the dysfunctional family with a tyrannical pater familias at the helm.

Working conditions also are featured in films such as Gabriela Pichler’s Eat Sleep Die (2012) and Amateurs (2018). In Eat Sleep Die, the director shifts perspectives and looks at how Swedes travel to Norway as guest workers. In Amateurs, it is very clear that the class issue exists and is important to the characters. Class differences cut right through the friendship between main characters Aida, whose family live off the aunt’s cleaning job, and Dana, who lives in the lap of material security. This is distinctly conveyed in the dinner scene, when Aida and her aunt pay a visit to Dana’s family. There is a definite atmosphere around the table. Dana’s mother talks about her food and Aida’s aunt talks about hers; there are similarities in their food cultures. Aida’s aunt says she is worried about her job, that the girls are causing problems with their film, and that she’s afraid she will get fired from her council cleaning job. Dana’s mother is of the opposite opinion, saying they are clever, brave girls and should carry on doing what they’re doing, making their voices heard. Aida’s aunt says that they can’t afford to sacrifice anything for the ideal Dana’s mother is talking about. Dana’s mother says she understands Aida’s family’s position, but that she herself has sacrificed a lot to ensure that Dana can freely express her opinion, play the drums, sing, and express herself generally. The middle-class endeavour to realize goals is contrasted with the worker’s complete lack of any leeway to be able to do the same. The scene is important not just because it highlights the class differences, but also because it shows how these differences also exist within a group that is far too often generalized into the epithet ‘immigrants’. Also, not all of these immigrants speak the same language, which is also a feature of Jag heter Stelios. In another scene, Aida is filming her cousins while they clean the town hall. Similar scenes can be found in Eat Sleep Die, where there are long takes showing lead character Rasa wrapping salads. Depictions of monotonous hard work are important, especially to give a broader representation of a new, often racialized underclass in Sweden.

These are just some of the films that portray the people who have come to Sweden to work and try to build a better life. There are huge differences between the films. They were made at different times, and also belong to different genres. One similarity is that they are all made in a kind of dialogue. This might be between the new and the old homeland, their film audiences, or between the director and different national film productions. Ultimately, the films exist in an ongoing dialogue between the local and global.

(published in Swedish in July 2022 and in English in November 2022, translation by Matt Bibby)