About the programme:

The incipit is the 1950s educational Disney-style animated film by Billy Klüver, where the motion of the electrons is explained for a wider audience. The film was produced as a substitute for Klüver’s doctoral thesis at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm. Animation is further developed in Edy Fung’s speculative visual and sonic fiction concerning silicon-based lifeforms and their evolution. Fung understands silicon not only as a physical material, but as a catalyst to pose ethical and existential questions, such as the role played by our (post)human bodies in a machine-dominated world.

Bringing the spectator back to human scale environments – from the lunar winter landscape of Kiev’s countryside to fossils – Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut by Lina Selander presents multiple layers of narrative, starting from the 1986’s nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Selander explores human life intended as a mechanism of social structures and ideological systems. In contrast, Katarina Löfström’s immersive, hypnotic works A Void and Chronos investigates the physical experiences of space (or lack thereof) and time through colour animation, sound and abstraction. To follow, the black & white Visusomatic – a film by Lars Siltberg shot in a laboratory for physical research – offers methods of intense observation. The film focuses on an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) system used to clear the air in the small chambers in which various tests on substances smaller than air particles take place. The slow, almost-surgical investigation of this technology goes from the macro to the granular, particles becoming pixels.

The programme concludes with Annika Ström’s poetic piece All My Dreams Have Come True, where the repeated trial and error mixes with the warmth and intimacy of personal relationships, perhaps alluding to the limitations and complexities of human nature.

I tre konstfilmer av de samiska filmskaparna Marja Helander, Liselotte Wajstedt och Sissel M Bergh möter vi tre kvinnliga mytologiska väsen ur den samiska berättartraditionen. I sägnerna talar de från en djup samhörighet med naturen. Vad hör vi om vi lyssnar?

Efter filmvisningen sker ett samtal mellan konstnären och filmskaparen Sissel M Bergh, Patricia Fjellgren, samisk kulturarbetare och Anneli Bäckman, curator på Gaaltije Saemien Museume.

EADNI
Liselotte Wajstedt
7:00 min. (2023)

Háldi är ett skogsväsen som sägs locka barn in i skogens djup. Men är hon bara en del av samisk mytologi, eller är hon lika verklig som du och jag? Vem är hon egentligen, och varför skulle hon vilja locka barn ut i skogen? EADNI, som betyder mor, är en visuellt mångbottnad saga som väcker eftertanke. I berättelsen om Háldi ryms en skapelseberättelse med hoppet om att vi ska skydda naturen och säkerställa att den eviga cykeln fortsätter. Den oändliga sagan om livets innersta väsen.

Liselotte Wajstedt är en multimediakonstnär och filmskapare från Giron/Kiruna, bosatt och verksam i Stockholm. Hennes konstnärskap rymmer film och video, collage, måleri, fotografi, skulptur, textil och installation.

Programmet är ett samarbete mellan Gaaltije Saemien Museume, Jamtli, Jämtland läns konstförening, Filmpool – Kultur i Jämtland Härjedalen och Folkets Bio Regina.

True to Life was shot in my garden in Kristinehamn in Sweden. I had bought a few closeup lenses for my camera, and when I put them together I discovered another world and started filming it. Then I amplified the sound of the camera brushing against the vegetation. (Gunvor Nelson)

ABOUT THE FILMS:

In and Out a Window, 2021, 12 min
Our front window, from inside and out. Made during a long covid lockdown. A product of the distraction and abstraction that resulted from a lot of staring at the same pieces of glass.

Mesmo Rio – Same River, 2019, 7 min
Rocks become sand become rocks become sand. All life is life on the beach. You can never step into the same river, or walk the same city, twice.

Self-portrait with Bag, 2020, 6 min
A camera-less portrait of the artist. Super 8 cartridges placed inside a black cotton bag, the film advanced via a hand crank. The tiny gaps in the fabric weave make for dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of tiny pinholes.

Tooborac, 2025, 9 min
Granite tors scattered over 20 square kilometers around Tooborac in central Victoria dance in ecstatic celebration of their own endurance.

Nude, Descending, 2025, 9 min
A performer descends the stairs. Direct film mattes frame glimpses of the motion. Phase-looping duplicates the glimpses into a cascade of humanity. A game played with colour separations, motion following hand scratched and painted mattes and a perpetual descending figure.

Fear of Floating, 2024, 7 min
Humanity approaches in an ineluctable wave of uncertainty and hope. A ferry crossing in Mumbai stands here for all such places and times of human expansion and human vulnerability.

The Land at Night, 2024, 14 min
I used to find the dusk a very unsettling time, as though the approaching night was something to be feared. It was as if, once night fell you could not flee, and had to face unspecified consequences. Maybe the land
remembers and the night will reveal what we might have done…

What images of Sweden exist beyond the major canonized names whose radiance and international fame have forced all other images to the side, as in so many other countries with small film production histories? This program moves between formal experiments, activist documentaries, and animated films focused on kinetic research, investigating some of these hidden traces, broken narratives, and alternative histories.

The selection includes amateur filmmaker Reinhold Holtermann’s Stockholmsbilder (1930), which can be considered as the first Swedish experimental film due to its imaginative and suggestive camera editing; films made in the context of different movements and groups – such as Arbetsgruppen för film (later Filmform), Svenska Filmligan, and FilmCentrum – and works displaying, in one way or another, connections between Swedish experimental film culture, international avant-garde films, and art.

The program is dedicated to Gunvor Nelson and Staffan Lamm, both of whom recently passed away. They are very different filmmakers: Nelson is the most famous Swedish experimental filmmaker, Lamm a hardly known documentary and essay filmer. Yet, their different aesthetic approaches reflect the breadth of Swedish avant-garde film culture and also encompass the various political methods which are gathered in this program. (Stefan Ramstedt, Martin Grennberger / Translation: Ted Fendt)

With Stefan Ramstedt and Martin Grennberger in attendance.

Amos Vogel (1921–2012), an Austrian-born Jew, became one of the most important figures in international film culture after his emigration to the United States. The Amos Vogel Atlas is a series dedicated continuing Vogel’s oppositional legacy alongside the study of his literary estate, which is deposited in the Film Museum. Rarities from the collection represent key focal points.