Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
As the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing theaters and dance companies to close down, the American choreographer Deborah Hay decides to let her dancers at the Cullberg dance company in Sweden continue their work and perform her latest piece in front of an empty theater in Stockholm. From her home in Austin, Texas, she writes them a letter proposing an experiment where instructions for movement will be replaced by a set of unanswerable questions. The film follows the dancers on and off the stage and captures their different reactions to the experiment. One dancer enjoys the freedom of a choreography without given movements while someone else finds it difficult and is too proud to change. Another dancer feels that the work allows her to return to her childhood and for the first time truly understand why she became a dancer in the first place.
Marcus Lindeen is a Swedish writer and director working with film and performance. In 2022, he premiered The Trilogy of Identities at Festival d’Automne in Paris, consisting of the plays Orlando et Mikael, Wild Minds and L’Aventure invisible. His performance works have been presented at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Schaubühne in Berlin, Piccolo Teatro in Milan and Wiener Festwochen in Vienna.
Marcus Lindeen’s feature documentary film The Raft premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen in 2018, where it won the main award. The Raft has since been shown in over fifty festivals (IDFA, BFI London, Zürich, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Moscow) and was theatrically released in eleven countries, among them France, Mexico, the UK and the US. The film became a New York Times Critic’s Pick and was broadcasted on BBC Storyville. The scenography for the film was exhibited as an art installation at Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2019, the film won the Prix Europa for Best European Television Documentary. The same prize was awarded to Marcus Lindeen’s debut film Regretters in 2011. Regretters is both a theater play and a documentary film about two Swedish men who talk about their individual journeys through gender reassignment and back again. The play has been translated into several languages and the film went on to win numerous awards, among them both the Swedish Academy Award (Guldbagge) and Kristallen (Swedish Emmy) for best documentary film in 2011. The same year his second film Accidentes Gloriosos premiered at The Venice Film Festival where it picked up the prize for best medium-length film.
In 2024, Marcus recieved a Ph.D. in artistic research from Stockholm University of the Arts, exploring the subject of “The Staged Conversation” through a project consisting of both film and theater works. His book on the subject, Iscensatta samtal (Staged conversations), is published in Swedish. The book can be ordered here.
Marcus is an associated artist at Piccolo Teatro in Milan and with Marianne Ségol he is an associated artist at three Centre Dramatique Nationale in France: Le Quai, CDN d’Angers Pays de Loire, CDN d’Orléans and CDN de Besançon. Together with Marianne he runs the Paris based theater company Wild Minds.
