Nordic Film Talks: Ester Bergsmark

Swedish filmmaker Ester Bergsmark has been working on her new film, A Sweetness from Nowhere (En ljuvlighet från ingenstans). She’s so close to it she’s not even sure how to describe it - containing essay, documentary and fiction elements - and is even called a “fable” in some descriptions - but she’s still getting her head around the term “hybrid”.

“I think it takes a while to meet the audience, to get to know the film as a person. It's been so close to me now. So I'm curious what I will call it in maybe a half year or so,” the director says in the new episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast series.

She says, not entirely joking: “I don't make it easy for myself. If I really want to understand a traumatic time with a joyful sense and with curiosity, I think it's going to be nerve-racking and fun and weird. I think the different cinematic forms within the film also carry different ways of truth telling, different ways of relating.”

The film mentions a transphobic attack that Bergsmark experienced in 2011, but she takes the story in many other directions, exploring human connections with the natural world; the vastness of time and space; bodily forms; starting to heal from fear and trauma; and finding new paths to joy. “I think it's about being with fear, but also how darkness and fear and things that are very heavy sometimes can transform into sources of power and beauty and connection and community,” Bergsmark says.

Bergsmark’s previous films - She Male Snails (Pojktanten, 2012, documentary) and Something Must Break (Nånting måste gå sönder, 2014, fiction) - have already made a global name for her as a bold and inventive storyteller. The film has its world premiere today (March 18) at CPH:DOX, and is sold internationally by Outplay. A Sweetness From Nowhere is already lining up its next screening at BFI Flare in London on March 21.

Anna-Maria Kantarius of Garagefilm, who also produced Bergsmark’s previous two features, produces. Co-producers are SVT, Film Stockholm AB, Film i Väst, Stær Films and Arktisk Film Norge Invest, with support from Nordisk Film & TV Fond (NFTVF), Creative Europe MEDIA, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Fritt Ord, the Swedish Film Institute, and the Norwegian Film Institute.

Stockholm-based Bergsmark has also worked as a visual artist - and the film relies on many shades of striking visuals, from scenes she shot with three actors playing sisters in her old apartment in Berlin (originally planned for use in a now-abandoned science fiction film), to extended sequences of jellyfish and opossums, who both can “freeze” when in danger, much like some humans do when under attack.

“I’m also doing somatics, in trauma therapy, myself,” says Bergsmark. “In the school where I trained, there was a lot of comparison to how the nervous system is developed through evolution, playing dead or freezing. Some people say we have three survival mechanisms: fight, flight or freeze. “Freeze” is the last way of staying alive; you play dead, conserve all the resources in your body, and numb out. There’s something like that in my human body, and it traces back to evolution from the jellyfish.”

Bodies both human and animal, alive, and even beautiful and nurturing in death, are explored in A Sweetness from Nowhere. “I've been very fascinated by the body and time. It's been a long process of reconnecting with the body. I think many trans people and queer people have this experience of threat and violence and attack, and that creates a state of hyper alertness; the body is a place that could be dangerous to dwell in. So for me, it's also been a way back to the body.”

She continues, “Moving images can have this way of numbing us. But for me as a filmmaker, film has always been a source of presence and connection. Some of the images in the film I shot in my old apartment in Berlin, and it's like those moments where it's almost like the world says to me: ‘Bring up your camera, I have something to show you.’ It's almost like the camera has always been a place for being in the body for me. For presence, for connections, for another way of slowing down.”

In the full podcast interview, she also talks about how the footage of jellyfish off the coast of Sweden reminded her of disco balls; how filmmakers like Chantal Akerman and Tsai Ming-liang inspire her; and giving space in the edit for the audience to bring in their own connections and interpretations.

Listen to the podcast here:

All Nordic Film Talks episodes are available on NFTVF’s website in the Industry Insights section (CLICK HERE), and on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.