Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2025

During the inter-war period, as the vision of an ideal social democratic society took shape, Swedish children’s cinema increasingly intersected with ideological currents such as nationalism and moral narratives surrounding childhood. In this context, children’s cinema evolved beyond mere entertainment to become a cultural artefact that articulated national identity, moral values and socially constructed ideals of childhood. While scholarly consensus situates the emergence of Swedish children’s film history in the mid-1940s, I argue that Trollsländan (‘The dragonfly’), directed by Pauline Brunius in 1920, already reflected these ideological demands in both its contextual and textual dimensions. This article examines the film’s production intentions, marketing strategies, critical reception, exhibition practices, narrative structure and representation to provide a deeper understanding of how ‘The dragonfly’ responds to – and negotiates – critiques of prevailing social and moral norms.

This short subject explores the function of irony in Woman at War (Erlingsson 2018), particularly through the lens of Paul de Man’s theory of irony and its connection to the parabasis of Attic comedy. It argues that the recurring appearance of musicians and Ukrainian chorus singers – visible only to the audience – acts as a structural interruption that breaks the film’s narrative coherence. These interventions signal a self-reflexive stance that undermines the film’s verisimilitude and complicates its engagement with environmentalist discourse in a late capitalist context. Here, irony is not merely rhetorical but also political: it exposes the gap between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inertia of state and corporate responses. The viewer is drawn into this paradox, positioned as a witness to both the collapse of narrative illusion and the spectacle of planetary collapse itself.

The success of a film depends on producers and creative teams making correct decisions during the production process. Decisions in film production create tension that arises from the internal organization of the companies, the nature of the film product and the type of decision-making processes before and during filming. Our aim is to focus on decision-making as a critical issue for production research. Furthermore, we highlight the distinctive features of the Finnish film context that may influence the way decisions are made. To this end, we combine our theoretical review with comments and reflections from an in-depth interview with the Finnish producer Jussi Rauntamäki about his multiple works. Our conceptual framework combines paradox theory with insights from film studies and cognitive science that can be used in studies aimed at unravelling paradoxes in the context of Finnish film production that are brought to light in the interview.