Swedish Movie Biz at a Crossroads
variety.comAnnika Pham Half a dozen Sweden pics and co-prods are set to storm the Croisette, flagships of the solid public support system in place, and fully or partly shot in a foreign language.
Headlining the slate are the completion entries “Triangle of Sadness” by former winner Ruben Östlund (“The Square”), shot in the English language, and the Arabic-speaking thriller “Boy From Heaven” by Tarik Saleh (“The Nile Hilton Incident”), set in Cairo.
Meanwhile, the Iranian/Danish Ali Abbasi (“Border”) is debuting in the main competition with the Farsi-language “Holy Spider,” majority-Danish produced with Sweden among co-production partners.Elsewhere, the parallel section ACID is showcasing the Swedish doc “How to Save a Dead Friend” by Russia’s Marusya Syroechkovskaya, and three Swedish co-prods are bowing at Un Certain Regard: “Godland” by Iceland’s Hlynur Pálmason, “Sick of Myself” by Norway’s Kristoffer Borgli and “Butterfly Vision” by Ukrainian Maksym Nakonechnyi. “Swedish filmmakers are increasingly telling stories set outside Sweden, tackling universal themes,” says Magdalena Jangard, head of production at the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), who handles a 318 million kroner ($32.4 million) production budget for 2022 across feature-length fiction films, docs and shorts.“This year’s outstanding slate follows up on the Cannes Label selected ‘Pleasure,’ set in the L.A.
porn industry, and last year’s Directors’ Fortnight’s ‘Clara Sola,’ set in Costa-Rica. Swedish films are becoming more international, and this is partly thanks to our public-funding system that empowers artistic freedom,” Jangard says.The SFI executive says the long-term director-producer partnerships between Östlund and Plattfom Produktion’s Erik Hemmendorff, or.
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