Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Approaching Race and Ethnicity in Nordic Film Culture, Mar 2022

This article analyses the incorporation of amateur and first-person filmmaking in Gabriela Pichler’s comedy drama Amatörer (Amateurs) (2018) as a contradiction and alternative to the professional economies of media that tend to reinforce middle-class Swedish Whiteness and silence the experiences of minority populations of divergent races, ethnicities and social class.

This short subject analyses the racialized dynamics of the Norwegian TV series SKAM vis-à-vis its representation of queerness. It argues that the Muslim character Sana stands in for the ‘good ethnic’ who simultaneously represents the ‘backwardness’ of her religion and the imaginary of Norwegian multiculturalism that can ‘rehabilitate’ her into its image.

Ulaa Salim's 2019 film, Sons of Denmark, employs terror melodrama, an iteration of the melodramatic mode related to 9/11 that represents the nation as innocent and violated. This allows the film to raise questions about masculinity, systemic racism and white innocence in the decades-long rise of far-right political parties in Denmark.

In the 1970s, Norway had not officially acknowledged their Indigenous population, the Sámi. In the following decade, two activist films, Let the River Live (Greve 1980) and The Taking of Sámiland (Eriksen and Tannvik 1984), focused on the Alta conflict – protests against the construction of a power plant in Sámi territory – Indigenous rights and colonial processes. Inspired by discussions concerning documentary, activism and decolonialism, this article investigates how the films frame Sámi interests and challenge perceptions of the Norwegian state. Because both films are collaborations across ethnic boundaries, they also challenge the supposed insider/outsider perspective of Sámi and Indigenous film, offering decolonial narratives by centring on Indigenous voices and experiences, confronting the idea of Norway as homogenous and representing the state as a colonial oppressor. They represent a political turning point that has changed politics, film production and collective memory.

The Sámi are a linguistic, ethnic and cultural Indigenous minority in three Nordic countries, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Much of the perception of this minority comes from the majority media of these countries. Media in general have often been accused of under- and misrepresenting the Sámi. Previous research, however, has mainly concerned the news media. The article examines how the Sámi are portrayed in two television series, the Swedish Midnight Sun (2016) and the Norwegian Heartless (2013). Since television is a popular medium, the representation of the Sámi in these series can significantly impact the general perception of the group. Drawing on recent migration theory, the article examines how Sámi- and non-Sámi-produced television impacts the perception and apparent authenticity of the Indigenous population.

The article examines Jewish ‘self-images’ in Swedish post-war film. Before World War II, antisemitic caricatures were prevalent in Swedish film and visual culture. Following the Holocaust, Jews as such were virtually erased from Swedish screens. Written by and starring Marie-Louise Ekman, Hallo Baby (Bergenstråhle 1976) was a rare exception, the first Swedish post-war film to explore Swedish-Jewish identity. The 2002 comedy Livet i 8 bitar (Bit by Bit) (Metzger) remains the last of only a handful of films to fit said description. Significantly, both films draw heavily on established antisemitic tropes in their figurations of ‘Jewishness’. Through historically contextualized readings of the two films, including their reception, the article thus shows how the tradition of antisemitic caricature that prevailed until World War II has continued to condition Jewish self-representation in the post-war era.