Fade Away
In twenty years many Swedes will have forgotten how to ski and “Vasaloppet” will be but a memory. This is the prediction of the TV-meteorologist Pär Holmgren.
A horrific thought; a Sweden without snow. A feeling that we are losing something, that everything is fading away, slowly disappearing. But at the same time, a wish for something else. A search for a better place on earth. Does such a place exist? And if it does, where can it be found? In Alaska? Norrland? Siena? Two of the films in this programme use Alaska as a metaphor, for the filmmakers had never been there. Nostalgic memories from those ski slopes of the past. A search for our roots, our identities. A different Me. A different You. A different We. The Other is left behind. The Others. This programme contains both seriousness and humour and we get to see a lot of snow as early as October. Welcome!

NOTE!! The programme will be screened once at The Cinemateque in Stockholm, Sturebiografen, Birger Jarlsgatan 41. Sunday 18th october 4 pm. Tickets can be purchased at Sture. Minimum age 15 yrs. Cinemateque membership required, see their website for more information.

Programme:
Jessica Faiss – Smoke
2007, 3:40 min, DV, 4:3, Mute, Color
SMOKE depicts a burning incense stick. The smoke meanders upwards against a dark neutral background forming forever changing figures.

Hanna Ljungh - Exit: Alaska
2003, 4:30 min, DV, 4:3, Stereo, Color
In the video installation Exit: Alaska Hanna Ljungh uses the script from the movie 'Five Easy Pieces' (1970). One scene from the film features two women hitchhiking across the USA with the aim to reach Alaska. Together with a friend Hanna reconstructed the scene by making a similar trip in her native country Sweden using the film script in conversation with the people who give them a ride. The soundtrack is coupled with a filmed sugar landscape and a monitor with the text. The installation is bound together by a white carpet slowly becoming dirtier with every visitor that enters the room. Exit: Alaska is an attempt to deconstruct an image. In the installation layers of fictional and real information are made to strive in different directions and clash with each other. The installation plays with the inherent contradictions within an action. Where the dirt of the everyday and the lame attempt is juxtaposed in the same room as the grand visions of stark white horizons.

r a k e t a – Far North
2009, 9 min, DV, 4:3, Stereo, Color
Where are the mountains, we wondered?
And went there!
Where is the ocean?
We checked that out as well.
The trip took us four years.
The film lasts nine minutes.

Marius Dybwad Brandrud - Hope
2009, 5:29 min, DV, 4:3, Stereo, Color
We worked with it for seven years. My mother and I. Trying to take the perfect picture of me. Together.

Mårten Nilsson och Gunilla Heilborn - This is Alaska
2009, 10:40 min, 35 mm, 1:1,85, Dolby Stereo, Color
A group of people have moved to Alaska, to search for freedom.
They form an individualist group called Extreme Individualists.

Liselotte Wajstedt - Faces
2008, 3:29 min, DVD, 16:9, Stereo, Color
Filmed in Norrland during the summer of 2008. The faces of the Samis are like landscapes, faces that are integrated into the landscape and becoming part of a bigger entity. The music is by Peter Svenzon and is performed with voices only, without instruments. The film is part of the dance performance ”Sami”, by Charlotte Öfverholm.

Imri Sandström - Katarina Ana Nervosa
2008, 20 min, DV, 4:3, Stereo, Color
Based on the story of Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth century saint who refrained from eating, and Ana, a present-day anorexic. Katarina Ana Nervosa is a melodic meditation on body, language and the presence of history.

Lina Selander - When the sun sets it’s all red, then it disappears
2008, 9:27 min, DV, 4:3, Stereo, Color
Lina Selander’s work When the sun sets it’s all red, then it disappears takes Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise as its starting point. Examining the relationship between political, utopian and emotional expressions in words and images, it explores the revolutionary zeal of a time and the desire to start all over again. La Chinoise is a film in the making, a film that tells the story of a revolutionary and truth-seeking common narrative while at the same time trying to be a part of it, sharing its inherent expressions and problems. Lina Selander’s film is also a work in the making, engaging and evolving around Godard’s film and the questions it addresses and responds to. But it is also an installation about photography and storytelling. Most of the photographs in the series of stills are from the 1968 student revolts in Paris and Stockholm, taken at meetings and demonstrations. But they also show other motifs, such as a close-up of a growing blob of moisture on a news reel showing Chairman Mao swimming in the Yellow River, personal photos and some stills from La Chinoise. All the images have been photographed with flash and all the photos have a white circular reflection on them which may represent or constitute a common space where the spectator’s space and that of the motif overlap, but where they are also defined as separate – a blinding dazzle or hole in the image which ultimately blocks any final narrative and forces itself into the motifs and events that are being documented.