Förår gives a portrait of the violence inherent in the most common industrial machinery and technological instruments. No technology is devoid of agency. Here, Skoog’s case in point is the everyday use of hunting rifles. The film follows the rifle as an agent in itself and its life in the hands of local citizens in a Swedish village. This hurls us back to the very birth of cinema. In the 1880s the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun with which he captured birds in flight. The fired gun contained 12 glass plates with the continuous movement of birds across the sky. The metaphor of “shooting” a film is not really a metaphor at all.

Förår is loosely based on the news-story about an 11-year old German girl that a few years ago stole her fathers hunting rifle and paraded down main-street in the small town she lived in.
Things happened but its hard to remember exactly the right order, how you got to one place from another, what someone said. The title loosely translates from Swedish as the season ‘Spring’. An old-Swedish word, not used anymore, Förår is connected to the seasons in farming. Fore-year, Harvest-year and After-year: Spring, Summer and Autumn/Winter. The connotation of the Swedish word can be more foreboding than its Anglicized counter-part. Akin to the feeling that something is to happen but one cannot yet see it.