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Reviews
Babels hus (1981)
TV-mini adaptation of a great novel
During the seventies there was a great frameshift of the Swedish healthcare system, resulting in the abandonment of the smaller rural hospitals in favor of huge centralized university hospitals.
One of these faceless novel temples of medicine is portrayed as the fictional "Enskede sjukhus".
At the center of this story is an old man who suffers a heart attack and then embarks on a journey which spans the endless miles of the hospitals corridors, shuffled from one ward to another as more and more diagnoses are filed into his journal.
The title "Babels hus" (trans. "The house of Babel") is a poke at the contemporary situation in a system where the mighty professors work under the same roof as the lowliest janitors but have lost the ability to understand one another.
Skuggpojkarna (2001)
Not for the faint of heart
Lars Norén, Swedens perhaps most famous as well as infamous theatrical director has done it again.
An adaptation of a stage production, "skuggpojkarna" tells the story of a group of inmates in a prison reserved for the criminally insane.
These men are murderers, child molesters and rapists, but as is well pointed out, still human beings.
This play depicts the prisoners and their conflict with remorse, or sometimes their lack of it in a chilling and thought provoking manner. Norén barrs no emotion or dialogue from his work. Make no mistake, this is as raw and gritty as it gets.
Svenska slut (2002)
Strange, but interesting
This series first aired on swedish public tv early in ´02.
A surreal dystopic story portraying life in one of northern Europes deep-storage facilities for nuclear waste in the mid 21st century. Life on the surface has been made impossible due to radiation.
Central characters are Isildur and his collegues, the waste technicians who dream of retiring to a tropical island. Others include the derranged scientists working on a project to create some sort of radiation-immune human clone to deal with Europe´s increasing output of radioactive waste.
This is not however your avarage sci-fi series, but rather some intellectual directors quite twisted brainchild. Pretty good though.
Hon dansade en sommar (1951)
A piece of history (of sorts)
This film was upon it´s release subject to much attention, not only in Sweden, but across most of Europe. This perhaps not due to any particular cineastic greatness but rather the rather candid nude swimming scene (perhaps the first in a non-adult feature film making it past the scissors of the censors) which sparked somewhat of an outcry amongst morality watchdogs.
In short, this film acted as sort of a springbord for a new wave of filmmaking in nothern Europe.