Join us on June 12 for a screening of Prejudice & Pride – Swedish Film Queer (Fördom & Stolthet, dir. Eva Beling, 2022), a documentary and rainbow-colored roller coaster ride through the history of Swedish queer cinema! Director Eva Beling will be present for a film talk and Q&A after the screening.
How could it possibly take 100 years to see a same-sex kiss in Swedish feature film? Queer people have played many roles throughout the entire history of Swedish film, but early onscreen portrayals of queerness were often profoundly tragic. In real-world Sweden, same-sex relationships were illegal until 1944 and queer people were officially considered mentally ill until 1979. Yet cinema has the power to subvert social norms, and this is certainly true with respect to LGBTQ representation in 20th-century film. Even 90 years ago, leading ladies wore tuxedos and smoked cigarettes, while male actors could wear makeup or women’s clothing without alienating conservative audiences. From Mauritz Stiller’s first portrayal of gay romance in 1916 to Sweden’s exciting new wave of transgender films, a dive into the archives shows that queer history is inseparable from the history of Swedish cinema. This archival material sheds new light on Ingmar Bergman, Greta Garbo, the role of camp in ’70s exploitation film and the ongoing struggle for queer liberation.
In this documentary, director Eva Beling blends footage from the Swedish Film Institute archives and interviews with many pioneers of Swedish cinema. These include director Marie-Louise Ekman, writer and performer Jonas Gardell and Rikard Wolff, whose character Zac in House of Angels was one of the first widely loved queer figures in cinema. She also spoke with other figures about Swedish queer cinema today, including Mian Lodalen, Saga Becker, Gösta Ekman, Levan Akin, Ella Lemhagen, Bruce LaBruce and others.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
Eva Beling is a Swedish/American Director and Producer with a BA from San Francisco State University. In San Francisco she received The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy Award Production Scholarship. Among her major productions are The Women and Bergman (2007), The Men and Bergman (2008), and the two-part TV series A Life With Cinema (2011) about Sweden’s legendary film critic Mr. Nils Petter Sundgren. Prejudice & Pride -Swedish Film Queer is her first feature-length documentary. The film had its European premiere at the 63rd Nordische Filmtage Lübeck and Nordic premiere at Göteborg Film Festival.
Prejudice & Pride is a Beling Films production in Co-production with SVT, Film i Väst and Film Stockholm with financial support by The Swedish Film Institute, film commissioner Antonio Russo Merenda, and The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and with support from the production company’s co-producer Shoot & Post.