International Competition

Shot at the height of summer in the Swedish village of Kvidinge, John Skoog’s debut feature is both a portrait of migrant workers and a symphony of mechanized manufacturing. To bear witness to its magisterial images is to confront the eeriness of modern labour, while the tension between beautiful pastoral scenes, on the one hand, and discomfiting images of production, on the other, helps create a sense of dissonance so crucial to the film’s investigation of capitalism and its alienating effects. Although Skoog mainly concerns himself with scenes of harvest work much of it done by machine, his gaze remains sensitive to the human characters on the fringes of the frame: Beata, a seasonal worker who comes to Sweden for the first time, Aaron, a young man with a broken heart returning to the place where he grew up, and Billie, a girl lost in her first summer vacation.