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Bävan Biografi La viande + L'amour Bogland The Mill & the Cross
Poet of the Elephant House
The Autumn Man Your Mind is Bigger Than all Scrap
La favola del pennello/ The Tree Lover in the land of the cranes/ Historia
I think of myself - and the left Freedom Calf Jasper Hiding behind the camera The Zone
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| Biografi | |||
| Sweden, 2012, 21 min, DCP, Colour | |||
| A film by Magnus Bärtås | |||
| Biografi is a new way to tell a story inside a documentary frame. The narration is divided into two parts, one is performing the story, the other is the medium for the text. |
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| With | Andreas Stridner, Erik Stern | ||
| Director, screenplay, editor | Magnus Bärtås | ||
| Producer | Freddy Olsson | ||
| Cinematography, gaffer, ass editor | Marius Dybwad Brandrud | ||
| Sound, soundmix | Claes Lundberg | ||
| Wardrobe, still photographer | Hyun-Jin Kwak |
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| Make up | Åsa Norman | ||
| Archive still photography | Patrik Håkansson, Christian Johansson | ||
| Archive footage | Christian Johansson, Per Linde | ||
Produced by Bokomotiv Filmproduktion AB with support from Kulturbryggan and IASPIS. |
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| Ola S. Svensson distinguished himself from early age with his large body and uncontrollable laughter, a photographic memory and knowledge that surpassed the teachers'. He became a person on whom the friends could test their knowledge, but they never manage to budge him verbally, instead, they opted to grip onto his neck and his arms. Through all his years in school and also even later in life, he retained this talent for attracting blows and kicks and heavy-handed embraces. Ola S. Svensson was obsessed with power structures and exposed him self to abusing power regimes, but he was also a literary talent and admired, and identified himself with, the UN nation Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld – the Swedish writer, economist and diplomat. At the university he revived the Swedish Social Democratic Student Association and after that he was elected into the party's chairman committee. Despite Ola’s uncontrollable laughter, huge body and his habits to digress into long, detailed accounts of obscure fractions of knowledge – which made him appear less slick than politicians in general – he was predicted a bright future within the Social Democratic party. His sudden sickness and death in AIDS coincides with the death of politics as an expression of intention and will and as a force of social imagination. Ola S. Svensson period in politics was a transit period to a phase that has been called the era of post-politics.
BIOGRAFI is an experiment with the form of documentary. Using archival material and staged scenes the story is told in fragments, with an artifact-like presence. The two actors – physically marking two points in the biography – establish a highly textual relation to the story, employing a voice over that moves in between several overlapping domains: of storytelling, acting, informing, commenting, reading, arguing, nominating, testifying, affirming… The voices move from monologue to dialogue and are at some parts occupied with enumerations, names and naming. Proper nouns are the shortest biographies of them all and proper nouns obviously have a completely different connection to our world and the people in it, compared to other words, with their ability to transmit and establish ties between spheres of reality: between the text and the physical world, between the text and the laws, between the text and the individual. With a few props, a few images and minimal action the tragic biography of Ola S. Svensson is told with no sentimentality but strong undercurrents of emotions.
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Magnus Bärtås