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.
Intermingling cartoons and newsreels, documentary film-maker Eric M. Nilsson tells a science fiction story about a journey of a spaceship towards the galaxy of the Swan. The rocket left earth 52 years ago. No one knows when it will reach its destination. Ormgard, a passenger and humanist, is distrustful of the captain who proclaims that ‘individual view must not be allowed to harm the collective’. Ormgard decides to try to find the truth behind the mission and escapes – only to discover the bird song and greenery of the earth on the other side of the steel hull of the spaceship.
Eric Michel Nilsson was born in Brussels in 1935, he moved to Sweden at the age of 15.
Nilsson was educated in directing at the reputable film school IDHEC in Paris. In the early 1960s, he came to be a part of the then newly started department of documentary film at SVT, and it was in television that Eric M Nilsson got the opportunity to develop his associative pictorial storytelling. A variety and mix of genres are unmistakable in Nilsson’s work: essay films as Anonym and Åtgärdas alongside documentaries as Djurgårdsfärjan, and the experimentation in form in Passageraren, Brutal, and Ormgard. The common denominator is mistrust in language and an interest in the creation of meaning in the relations between words and images.
In the films of Eric M Nilsson there is consistently a playful approach, and at the same time, a critic of the medium’s illusory qualities and its ability to trick its viewers.
