How to Make a Nation: Filmform x MDT film programme

Centering Skeppsholmen’s military history this film programme draws from Filmform’s archive to explore the relationship between art and culture and war and weaponry. We explore how these aspects intermingle and are deployed as tools in building and fortifying nations. 

Currently, we experience and witness how arts and culture are being increasingly and systematically defunded, while national defence budgets systematically expand through, amongst other means, the depletion of arts and culture and social programme budgets. We see this happening in countries of the global north, not least in Sweden. When state sanctioned destruction and/or defunding of art occurs, it has historically been the means through which a state attempts to redefine itself and symbolically defend its imagined identity. This act is twinned through the related burgeoning of military budgets as well as increasing militarisation and surveillance in our everyday lives. In this way the state's borders, largely understood to be only marked and markable on maps and earth, expand to include bodies, behaviours and art canons. The state defends itself from within and without, through soft and hard means. 

In conversation with the films Sicherheit by Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman & Corina Oprea and Scented Rooms by Shauheen Daneshfar, we explore this and more.

Following the film programme will be a conversation that departs from the thematics of the films and the evening. 

Programme

19:00 – 20:00: Sicherheit by Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman & Corina Oprea and Scented Rooms by Shauheen Daneshfar. Both films are shown with English subtitles.

20:15 – 20:45 Moderated conversation.

Sicherheit

By Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman, Corina Oprea.

Per capita Sweden is one of the world’s largest weapon exporters in parallel with the self-promotion of a peace-making nation worldwide. Intertwined in the narrative presented in the film, the authors are building a replica of one of Sweden´s most sold hand held weapons. The film Sicherheit (German for “Security”) made collaboratively by Saskia Holmkvist, Ellen Nyman & Corina Oprea stresses the construction of colonial modernity in the Swedish imaginary. Through a research process the authors seek to endow the image of Swedish weapon industry with a contextual agency. By linking it to people, places of importance to the production of weapons as Karlskoga, Luleå and Göteborg and events whose intersection within a wide variety of imagery gives rise to linking western security with paths of migration, the film tests History in terms of the present. The resulting trajectories effectively link established discourses, proposing transcultural and political re-readings.

The film’s title refers to the term Sicherheit used by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to describe how security solutions are built on a false sense of security, – which can only be compensated for with more security, since they create more fear out of which an escalation of conflict follows. In the work with the film connections are drawn between questions of security, migration and weapon export in order to approach a self-image of a country like Sweden. 

Languages: Swedish & English & Serbian & Arabic

Subtitles: English

Duration: 21:57 min

Year: 2017

Scented Rooms 

By Shauheen Daneshfar.

In 1979, during and after the Islamic Revolution of Iran, a vast number of cinema and theatre halls were set on fire by extremist revolutionaries or closed forever. Consequently, many artists and workers were forced to give up their professions. The phenomenon in question can be considered an effort of the government to further change the country’s cultural identity. One of the closed-down theatres was Tamashakhaneh Tehran, the country’s oldest modern theatre built in 1915. By revisiting the theatre, the film aims to draw attention to a suffocated social culture. Through patient observations and metaphoric statements, the filmmaker brings this omitted subject to the centre of attention.

Besides referencing history and factual events through the use of archive materials, interviews, and, the artist utilises poetic text and imagery besides choreographed pieces to uncover the abstract collective memory of this theatre and the era. The intention is to invite the audience to witness something silent for a long time gain expression again.

Scented Rooms narrates the story utilising poetic and metaphoric language, revisiting the theatre’s interior architecture, and skims through archive materials and historical events. The film observes ruined objects that have remained in the building. It shows original recordings from the past besides re-enactment pieces that are filmed in a theatrical space in Stockholm, representing the actors who had been oppressed and banned from working. Additionally, leaning into interviews with people, past events are being reviewed. The film avoids being merely descriptive and elevates factual references through its dedication to metaphoric language.

By using 35mm film, the film aims to reach a specific aesthetic which can convey the memory of the era. As the celluloid film on which the footage is captured has gone through a decay process, it can be considered an agent in the creation of the image and in reaching the memory of the theatre thereof.

Languages: Persian

Subtitles: English

Duration: 30:00 min

Year: 2023