Mikael Kristersson

Three farming families in Hanyuan, China, strive to give their children a good life in the midst of an ecological crisis, as widespread use of pesticides leads to a dramatic decline in bees and other pollinating insects in the valley.

Documentary about the eccentric Swedish vagabond Carl G. Johansson.

Swedish filmmaker Mikael Kristersson directs this austere yet beautiful experimental documentary about two European falcons. Shot over the course of two years, Kristersson manages to fashion a narrative without the use of voice-overs or music, showing the falcons as they forage for food and tend to their eggs. Much of this film, though, is spent viewing the world from the falcons' vantage point -- high up on a 13th century church steeple, watching the groundskeeper tending to the village cemetery and the choir boys growing tired of a long religious procession. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

Nature documentary filmmaker Mikael Kristersson captures the four seasons in his lush garden, complete with chicken sheds, greenhouse, vegetable beds, a hawthorn and a knotty old apple tree. The buzzing of insects and the chattering of birds are the only sounds in this peaceful observation, without commentary, of everyday life in the garden in Falsterbo, an old town in the south of Sweden. Kristersson shot this Super 16 footage over a period of 20 years and edited it together into a natural rhythm.

In Pica Pica Kristersson invites the viewer to be enthralled for an hour and a half by the vicissitudes of magpie life. Opposing himself to the current nature films that tend to highly compress time in order to end up with a concentrated sequence of action-elements Kristersson leaves rhythm and tempo almost completely up to the magpies themselves. With great integrity he filmed the daily, social and emotional life of a species of birds that has many points of contact with human life. Thus, the movie offers us the oppurtunity to view our own everyday existence through other eyes, from a world right above our heads, but yet so far away.

A documentary about the nature cinematographer Mikael Kristersson in Falsterbo.

The starling is a common bird that lives in close proximity to humans. It nests in hollows in trees, under roof tiles or in bird boxes. In Mikael Kristersson's film we see starlings from a new angle, inside a nest, from when they first inspect the nest site in early spring until the last chick flies away in June.