Cicely Irvine

Three Swedish actresses work as waitresses in Oslo one summer. They use all their wits to get as much tips as possible. They plan to start a company and buy a house. They come to be our guides in the film and reveal a world of people doing things they don't want to do, playing roles they don't know why they're playing.

Mariken Halle first asked around her neighborhood if she might make a school film about one of her neighbors. When that didn’t work, she and her small film crew began addressing people on the streets of Göteborg. How would they imagine a movie that they would want to star in? The results were far from fantastic – she encountered dismissively amused responses and boring, confused ideas. But some of the people she talked to were different. They try getting into their “life role” – and she begins to direct them....

How do you know that someone is a ghost? You can't see his legs.

Somewhere in the Balkans, in a garden hidden by a large house, a story unfolds of a great love between two young women. Neither of them wishes to accept that their relationship might ever end. What happens, then, when one day fate takes an unexpected turn? Is it possible to part so suddenly from your beloved?

The Power Grid is about feeling tricked, seeing how a place is exploited and asking what is left of it. A personal film about power production and colonialism, about growing up surrounded by a wealth of mighty natural resources but being told you live in a poor region.

About the first three months of a pregnancy and a miscarriage. A story about the fragile balance between life and death where ambivalent feelings are intertwined with strange facts about fetal development. In the film, Magdalena Dziurlikowska play both the role of the pregnant woman who listens inward and the role of the fetus living in her own world. Pregnancy was for her a supernatural, fantastic story about the most mundane and natural. Suddenly the fetus died. It was the greatest grief she had experienced in her life.

In Bodén’s hometown of Jämtland, staying put is anathema: speaking to a group of kids about this drive to leave home, she is told by a male student that only “stupid girls” would stay there any longer than is necessary. This hits home with Bodén, who was prompted to her research here by a conversation in which her sister declared, “I don’t think I’m worth more than Jämtland.” After her initial dismissiveness of her sister’s statement, she started to second-guess the conversation and her own ingrained notions of what it meant. This film is about Bodén’s search for understanding.

A call center in Stockholm marks the starting point for a poetic and reflective documentary about what it means to live off the forest. With a unique tone and exquisite storytelling, director Clara Bodén explores the escalating distance between city and countryside.