AND STILL I RISE: THE SHORT FILMS OF NGOZI ONWURAH
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah
1988-1993, 70 min

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3 – 10:00 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 5:00 PM
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 – 7:30 PM

Born in Nigeria in 1966 to a Nigerian father and white British mother, Ngozi Onwurah migrated with her mother and brother to England as a child to avoid civil war. In her groundbreaking work as a filmmaker – Onwurah was the first black British woman to have a film theatrically released in Britain, 1995’s WELCOME II THE TERRORDOME – this tension is palpable: the tension between her black and white heritages, the tension between violence and peace, the tension of simply being a black woman in hostile territory.

Spectacle is proud to present three of Ngozi Onwurah’s early short works, to bring her sorely underseen films into the light.

Special thanks to Ashley Clark and Women Make Movies

COFFEE COLORED CHILDREN
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1988
15 minutes

A raw, unmitigated portrait of Onwurah’s childhood fears regarding her race, COFFEE COLORED CHILDREN portrays a young black girl and her brother who will go to any lengths to be white. The film is a stark portrayal of what happens when children of color internalize racism, and how it damages a young psyche.

THE BODY BEAUTIFUL
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1991
23 minutes

THE BODY BEAUTIFUL is another stunning piece of autobiographical filmmaking from Onwurah. Starring the director herself, alongside her mother Madge, the film is a devastating story about a young biracial model whose white mother undergoes a radical mastectomy. The film is a tribute to Madge, as well as an exploration of black and white bodies within traditional feminine beauty standards.

AND STILL I RISE
Dir. Ngozi Onwurah, 1993
30 minutes

Named after, and inspired by, a Maya Angelou poem, AND STILL I RISE is a searing exploration of popular culture’s fetishization of, and hatred for, black women’s sexuality. Rather than the dramatization of the other two films, Onwurah created a documentary portrait of mass media’s representations of black women, and the real, detrimental effects that these representations have on the lives of actual black women.

Of the filmmakers associated with the so-called New Swiss Cinema, itself not particularly well-known abroad, Michel Soutter has perhaps the least claim to being any kind of household name. Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta are known outside their homeland, but Soutter has largely remained what he consciously started out as: a provincial filmmaker. Throughout his three-decade long career he stuck to the region between Geneva and Fribourg, setting all his films in the cities and their immediate environs. This geographical intimacy translates to a personal intimacy. His main focus is always the little particularities and material details of the lives of his characters, the clothes they wear and the furnishings in their houses. But what makes Soutter interesting is not the mere documentary value of his films—the immortalization of various minutiae of life in the provinces—but the purposes he uses it for: denouncing the spiritual vacuity of the Swiss bourgeoisie, finding value in idle playfulness, and lending his voice to a frustrated generation of directionless rebels who rattle their golden fetters if not actually breaking through them.

In his later films Soutter would go on to collaborate with such well-known figures of French cinema as Jean-Louis Trintignant, Delphine Seyrig, and Pierre Clémenti, but in his early works he employed such home-bred talent as Jean-Luc Bideau, who also worked frequently with Tanner and Goretta. This series of Soutter’s first five features aims to highlight the charming modesty of his themes, his economy of means, and the subterranean force running through the apparent calmness of his work: the schizophrenic boredom of the Swiss, which makes the restless among them leap from one though to another arbitrarily, poetically, trying to learn to feel again by feigning joy and rage and dispassionately emulating real passions.

THE MOON WITH TEETH
a.k.a. La Lune avec les dents
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1966
Switzerland, 75 min.
In French with English subtitles

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 – 10:00 PM

“I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say it’s the most beautiful time of life.”

The first line of Sartre’s schoolmate and Resistance fighter Paul Nizan’s 1931 novella, Aden-Arabie, is echoed by William, the young and restless subject of Soutter’s first feature. William lives an uprooted life, structured by a worthless bowling alley job and punctuated by self-destructive binges. He’s the first of Soutter’s lonely rebel protagonists, young men with deep reserves of undirected energy and shapeless yearnings for liberation. He’s virile, brooding, and violent. He regards children, virginity, and love as weaknesses. With his materialistic nihilism, it’s as if he was picked straight out of a Dostoevsky novel: “You know how science defines life? Gradual degeneration culminating in death.”

William’s terminal dissatisfaction derives from that other major theme of Soutter’s: Swiss society. In his films, the Swiss are either content professionals and housewives or quarrelsome misfits without any positive vision of the ultimate upheaval that would deliver them from the airless luxury prison that Switzerland represents for them. Shoplifting out of boredom, William resorts to a typically Swiss argument when caught: “I was trying to economize.”

HASCHISCH
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1968
Switzerland, 77 min.
In French with English subtitles

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 – 5:00 PM

Soutter’s second feature fared better with the critics. At the very least, it showed the director’s mettle to continue building on his main preoccupations—feckless, aimless youth, absence of political solidarity and the anemic qualities of Swiss society—that had been the subject of so much initial derision. Like William in LA LUNE AVEC LES DENTS, Mathieu is another disciple of dissatisfaction trudging through everyday life. “Living together gets boring. We just save money,” says his friend, Bruno. An actor of the theater, Mathieu has few prospects in this trade, save for empty promises from his producer. At this point, he’s more a kind of flaneur—only, his sojourns don’t occur along the boulevards and arcades of Baudelaire’s Paris, but on the sterile streets of a nondescript town. All is bleak morass. Frustrated with his work in the theater, Mathieu decides he wants out of Switzerland. Matthew asks Bruno, a car mechanic, if he wants to split for Anatolia. Bruno agrees, breakups with his girlfriend and spiffs up his car. Meanwhile, Mathieu must pick up a theater friend, Pauline, an actress of note, from the airport. Naturally, Mathieu falls in love with her, and suddenly, leaving for Anatolia becomes all the more difficult.

In HASCHISCH, there aren’t any scenes of drugged-out dope fiends, but the title’s narcotic connotations run true throughout the film: Soutter captures his actors deep in the haze of their own private worlds as they walk through an unconvincing reality, one which always depresses the shoulders and dulls the mind (Pauline: “Good thing we don’t think!”). Soutter’s characters are always sharply aware of the moribund nature of their lives, but are unable act on their own desire for change. In one scene, Mathieu is in the recording studio and recites, ironically, a few lines by the Turkish poet, Nâzım Hikmet: “I contemplate Switzerland from the train. Her towns are boring but her sanatoriums are gay! Could I live among such respectable folks? Maybe when I’m 90…Why have I written about Switzerland?”

THE APPLE
a.k.a. La Pomme
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1969
Switzerland, 85 min.
In French with English subtitles

SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 – 5:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 31 – 7:30 PM

Soutter’s third feature follows a handful of young idlers and professionals in Geneva, living out the kind of sluggish, arbitrary existence that a country as suffocatingly prosperous as Switzerland makes possible. Something of a solitary revolutionary, Simon is mapping out the places in Geneva where Lenin lived in exile before the 1905 uprising. Simon’s boss, Marcel, is a jet-setting reporter and a perfect symbol of Swiss complacency, living in a suburban villa that he calls his “refuge from revolutions, civil wars, crises, and coups d’état.” When Simon’s girlfriend Laura comes to visit, a bitter triangle drama develops among them, as Simon’s hatred for Marcel and the world he represents keeps growing.

THE APPLE has been compared to Jean Eustache’s 1967 short film SANTA CLAUSE HAS BLUE EYES (starring Jean-Pierre Léaud) for its ability to capture all the nuances of both the happiness and the malaise of indecisive adolescents. Beyond that, it offers snapshots of late 1960s Geneva, an acerbic commentary on the self-satisfied, smug inertia of the Swiss bourgeoisie, and an indictment of the journalistic profession. As Simon says, “Switzerland has its ass placed squarely on the Third World,” and Soutter goes to infuriating lengths to convey the stiflingly peaceful postwar atmosphere that its isolated rebels feel a growing urge to break through.

JAMES OU PAS
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1970
Switzerland, 80 min.
In French with English subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 10 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 – 7:30 PM

If Soutter steered clear of any attempt to build a plot in his previous features, in JAMES OU PAS, Soutter offers enough dramatic inflections to show a marked change in his practice. As in Antonioni’s BLOW-UP, a witness to a potential act of crime jumpstarts the film. Hearing a gunshot, Hector (played by the irrepressible Jean-Luc Bideau), a low-wage cabdriver, stops his car midway somewhere in the Swiss fields and follows the man he suspects was responsible for the shooting. Instead, Hector runs into James, an enigmatic bachelor who lives all alone in his ivory-tower pad. James convinces him to pick up his friend Eva from the airport, and suddenly Hector—accustomed to a rote schedule—finds himself entangled with a group of strangers in a time and place he does not recognize. Hector’s quandary prompted Jean-Louis Bory to call JAMES OU PAS Soutter’s re-formulation of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be.” More to the point, as Soutter’s most perceptive critic, Freddy Buache, noted, a Soutter film usually boils down to “men and women at the intersection of everywhere and nowhere … brought together in unexpected situations by chance, and they have to unmask or mask themselves, become believable or make-believe, speak to each other, and, intentionally or not, confess to being what they are.”

Soutter’s dry humor finds its perfect mouthpiece in Bideau, who can rattle off monologues with jovial ease. The rotating cast of characters and chance encounters recall some of the fluid cat-and-mouse games of Jacques Rivette. Gone are the Bressonian, stone-faced types from his earlier films. The droll, everyday languorousness of Swiss life still remains in the backdrop, but with Soutter’s newly formed comic lightness, the absurd registers most strongly in JAMES OU PAS. Dazed from the turn of events, Hector, growing increasingly unable to distinguish reality from his own thoughts, says to himself, as if entranced, “I want life to be as it always has been: monotonous and comfortable.” Can anyone escape Soutter’s Swiss Inferno?

THE SURVEYORS
a.k.a. Les Arpenteurs
Dir. Michel Soutter, 1972
Switzerland, 81 min.
In French with English subtitles

MONDAY, AUGUST 3 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 7:30 PM

In his fifth feature, Soutter breaks his rule of portraying only the idle classes of Swiss society and the equally idle would-be fugitives from it. Leon—a lion of a man with a thick caterpillar mustache and heavy mutton chops—is a land surveyor whose job brings him to the country estate of Alice, a dreamy blonde who picks strawberries in the garden and never misses teatime with her mother. After a fleeting liaison in Alice’s house with a mysterious English woman who disappears as quickly as she appeared, Leon becomes terrified for his own sake (Was she of legal age? Will there be criminal charges? Was I trespassing?) and hires a lawyer to save his skin. An inveterate egoist, Leon’s statement of principle could easily double as a slogan of Swiss isolationism: “We’re never as strong as when we’re alone.”

THE SURVEYORS is firmly implanted in Soutter’s usual milieu of professionals living in the prosperous Swiss countryside, a world of lawyers, cellists, and noncommittally philosophizing young ladies. But here he adds an element of foreboding: the surveyors are invading the provinces, planning to build God knows what awful roads or shopping centers. The gentry are feeling a nebulous panic growing inside them. What will happen to our Switzerland of quaint chalets and verdant hills?

JAKARTA SCREAMS: HORROR & EXPLOITATION CINEMA OF INDONESIA

During the 1980’s the field of Indonesian cinema was undergoing significant changes that would pave the way for what is now known as the golden age of Indonesian exploitation cinema. After the brutal anti-communist purges of the 1960’s under the iron-fist of the archipelago’s strongman and dictator Suharto, the Indonesian working class and blue-collar laborers sought an escape from an oppressive reality.

In JAKARTA SCREAMS we will review the new Indonesian escapist cinema that ultimately delivered them from their authoritarian reality. This new style of regional filmmaking provided the high adrenaline violence and sexuality of Western cinema hybridized with the region’s traditional folkloric and mythological stories, archetypes and themes resulting in a form of cinema unlike any other in Southeast Asia or the globe. While some theorists claimed this form of filmmaking was only a bread and circus to maintain the control held by Suharto’s political regime, others claimed that the filmmakers exercised subversive symbolism, depicting government figures as the criminals and villains ultimately punished and destroyed in these epics for the small cinemas of villages and small towns.

This prolific period is the largest footprint Indonesian filmmakers have made to this day in the course of film history. Its surrealist fantastical horror films populated with shape-shifting martial arts warriors, demon-sorceresses and serpent-women invite the viewer the explore the depths of its sensual, absurd, tropical cinema.

MYSTICS IN BALI
1981, Dir. H. Tut Djalil
Indonesia. 86 min.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 – 5PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 6 – 10PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 – 10PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29 – 7:30PM

In H. Tut Djalil’s Indonesian horror-exploitation classic MYSTICS OF BALI, American anthropologist Catherine Keene seeks out training in the ways of the leyak, a cult of demonic Balinese sorceresses imbued with powerful and ancient magic. Having been seduced by the promise of mastery in the ancient tradition of leyak sorcery however, Cathy becomes trapped in the form of a penangalan, a floating disembodied vampiric head, spine and entrails with a fondness for devouring pregnant women and fetuses. With Cathy in the thrall of the leyak queen and unable to return to human form her lover Mahendra consults a local shaman to undo the leyak’s subversion and restore Cathy to her human form.

Djalil’s MYSTICS OF BALI,results in a compelling hybrid of Western cinematic style and the impromptu style of Indonesian cinema. Using non-actors and unconventional narrative structure, maestro of the Indonesian horror canon H. Tjut Djalil brings a campy fusion of American-style b-movie horror and action and Indonesian folktale to the screen resulting in a cannibalistic jaunt through the mountains of rural Bali.

LADY TERMINATOR
1989, Dir. H. Tjut Djalil
Indonesia. 82 min.

MONDAY, AUGUST 3 – 10PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 – 7:30PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 – 7:30PM

H. Tjut Djalil’s LADY TERMINATOR is based on the Javanese legend of Nyai Roro Kidul or the South Sea Queen, an enchanting siren-like figure that was said to be not only a powerful courtesan to the sultans of the islands but also a naga spirit, a Southeast Asian snake nymph, imbued with powerful and deadly magic.

Upon a research gathering assignment on a remote Indonesian island an American anthropological student becomes possessed by the spirit of the South Sea Queen, a long deceased witch with a powerful sexual endowment fatal to the men she seduces. Determined to rise again and seek revenge against the great grand-daughter of the man who stole her serpentine magic and return to her former power, the South Sea Queen seizes the body of this unsuspecting tourist in a strange land as her new host and begins wreaking chaos throughout the urban landscape of Jakarta. Leaving a trail of male bodies in her wake she is unstoppable until she meets local police detective Max McNeil.

In Djalil’s LADY TERMINATOR the classic myth of the South Sea Queen is brought into the context of the exploitation cinema genre’s that animated cinema and filmmaking in 1980’s Indonesia. Djalil’s twisted mash-up of American action and adventure films, LADY TERMINATOR, Indonesian folktale and martial arts b-movie genres results in something familiar and yet altogether unique, wonderful and strange.

THE WARRIOR
1981, Dir. Sisworo Gautama Putra
Indonesia. 92 min.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15 – 10PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 10PM
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25 – 7:30PM

In Sisworo Gautama Putra’s THE WARRIOR, Jaka Sembung is the champion of the province of Kandanghaur against the colonial oppression of the Dutch imperial machine in the Indonesian archipelago. Played with swagger and conviction by Barry Prima, after the title character Jaka Sembung leads a small uprising against a forced labor edict by the Dutch imperial forces, a local Dutch commander seeks to quell the rebellion through challenging Jaka Sembung to a contest of strength. Jaka Sembung overcomes this and a great many other challenges through the aid of traditional folk magic and his will to resist, including treacherous villagers, spies and the soldiers of the Dutch imperial army. After facing brutal torture and near defeat Jaka Sembung is transformed by his master into a boar to escape his captors and so he may hide before he leads his final assault against their imperial overlords.

Sisworo Gautama Putra’s THE WARRIOR is a notable masterpiece of Indonesian exploitation cinema particularly in that it is one of only a few films to address the brutality and trauma of Dutch occupation, albeit with a light heart and a great deal of homage in equal measure both to Indonesian folk tradition and to the martial arts films of Bruce Lee.

Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai
AKA Rain the Color of Blue with a little Red in it
Dir. Christopher Kirkley
Niger/United States
2015, 75 min
In Tamashek with English subtitles

SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – 7:30PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29 – 10PM

In 1979 Roger Corman wanted a disco movie, so his staff made sure that he was the only one on the production with a script that said “Disco High School.” Two weeks before shooting, director Allan Arkush broke it to his producer that everyone else’s scripts were called Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, and the Ramones were a punk band. “Why can’t they be disco,” Corman asked. Arkush responded, “You can’t blow up a high school to disco music.”

Since at least 1956, when Bill Haley & His Comets starred in Rock Around the Clock, the musician-centered rock drama has been one of the most versatile vehicles for pop proselytizing. There have been many tweaks to the Rock Around the Clock formula—musical genres, locales, vérité aesthetics—and Prince‘s Purple Rain might be called the capitalist variant. In 1975 the New York Time’s Vincent Canby famously asked, “What is Jaws but a big-budget Roger Corman film,” and by 1984 Corman’s operation had effectively been steamrolled by appropriation of exploitation formula’s amid Hollywood’s economies of scale. Purple Rain is also a big-budget Corman film, but despite its unabashedly generic construction it towers above other rock dramas as a true watershed: the genre’s first steroidally capitalistic Hollywood blockbuster.

So, it’s at least patently funny that the first fiction feature ever produced in the Tuareg language, which is spoken by about 1 million people in parts of Algeria, Libya, Mali, and Niger, is nominally a remake of Purple Rain. Or, sort of: there is no Tuareg word for “purple,” so Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai actually translates to “rain the color of blue with a little red in it.” Constructed around the personality of naturally charismatic lead Mduo Moctar and set in the world of Tuareg guitar music in Agadez, Niger—most internationally recognized for the work of Bombino (who is, come to think of it, signed to a subsidiary of Prince’s former record label)—Akounak gushes with pure, earnest enthusiasm for its sweded source material. Shrouded in mystery and kicking up desert sands on his purple motorcycle while riding between home recording studios and guitar parties, Moctar is a brilliant and even more likable analog to Prince’s “The Kid.” Whereas Purple Rain is premised about calculated obfuscation of ostensibly autobiographical detail—I learned as much about Minneapolis and Prince from Purple Rain as I did string theory—Akounak‘s filmmakers take a Rouch-lite approach to their collaboratively produced riff on social mores, religiosity, and third world distribution models.

Make no mistake: Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai works as blissful, effervescent entertainment, and it’s beautifully shot and edited like a fiction film even as its DIY production and documentary ethos shine through. Like the conglomerate clockwork strategies underpinning Purple Rain, it will make you a believer and a fan. —Jon Dieringer (Screen Slate)

In the 1980s, Sweden’s youth culture was carried away by Bruce Lee, THE KARATE KID, and hip-hop, ushering a new wave of counter-culture and youth rebellion. Combined with Sweden’s own version of the “video nasties,” which elevated otherwise rote actioners to must-see status (among them Mats Helge Olsson’s essential, homegrown breakout VHS hit NINJA MISSION), delinquency was on the rise. And just as it swept midwestern American mini-malls, taekwondo made the juvenile offenders’ feet their weapons of choice.

The new subculture, known as “kickers,” was immortalized in the most unlikely of fashions: STOCKHOLMSNATT, a highly polished feature docudrama financed by Sweden’s state-owned telephone company and made for compulsory viewing to discourage payphone sabotage. This was a big mistake: a trend that most people weren’t even aware of went national, and the young hood stars, who played fictionalized versions of themselves, became icons. Years later, in 1993, SÖKARNA, featuring similar cast members, extended the core essence of STOCKHOLMSNATT into a more mature, sex, drugs, and violence-fueled portrait of Stockholm on the brink of full-on social collapse.

While one might be tempted to imagine Sweden as a bunch of blonde haired, blue eyed babes in a cultural bubble, the kicker films are unique in their frank acknowledgement of social problems, racial tensions, immigration and transatlantic cultural (re-)reappropriation. They’re a thrilling window into an obscure international subculture and, at the very least, unbelievably entertaining—if not always intentionally. And as Swedish Sensationsfilms author Daniel Eckeford argues, they represent the culmination of decades of violence and smut in Swedish films before relaxed censorship and the floodgates of the internet gave young punks less to kick back against.

STOCKHOLMSNATT
aka STOCKHOLM NIGHT/THE KING OF KUNGSAN
Dir. Staffan Hildebrand, 1987
Sweden, 45 min.
In Swedish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 10 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 – 7:30 PM

STOCKHOLMSNATT is a true gem: a super stylized, state-supported 1987 quasi-docu-drama made for compulsory viewing in Swedish schools and designed to wean teens off a generally non-pervasive wave of random jumpkicking crimes—a non-trend that the movie then inadvertently popularized, making unlikely folk heroes out of its juvenile delinquent stars and christening Sweden’s “kicker” subculture.

Martial arts outlaw Paolo Roberti, already a notorious youth criminal, was hired to play himself as a young Italian Swede struggling with identity and feelings otherness. And like a lot of lost teens, he works this out through delinquency and violence, uniquely in this case by jumpkicking stuff like windows, people, and payphones, and really I guess just anything he can ram his foot into. His best friend, Quincy Delight Jones III (Quincy Delight Jones III, son of Quincy Jones and Swedish supermodel Ulla Andersson), tries to steer him on the right course, partially through the power of righteous positive synth jams. Parties, beatdowns, smash-n-grabs, teen romance, and a whole lotta jumpkicking ensue. Will any lessons be learned? Yes: jumpkicking stuff is awesome.

Transcending national borders, STOCKHOLMSNATT is the most overwhelmingly 80’s object ever made. It’s seriously like if Billys Idol and Squier had a jumpkicking movie baby. The music and fashion is so incredibly on-point, and it’s the kind of movie where when something sad happens there’s an epic guitar wail and suddenly Paolo is standing in a stairwell in the Kungsträdgården metro station while his long beautiful hair is backlit by neon and random fog rolls down the stairs (cue progressive baby-to-troubled-teen photo montage). It’s like this gritty glossy punchdance-fueled neon-neo-realism aesthetic filtered through badly failed corporate anti-vandalism propaganda. There’s even Swedish beatboxing and rapping. If anything, the seamless synthesizing of hair metal, synth pop, and hip-hop is a major feat in itself. Actually, maybe this is just a feature-length expansion of the Aerosmith/Run-DMC “Walk This Way” video, only mixed with the Michael Jackson video where he transforms from panther form and smashes a car.

I don’t want to spoil anything but I seriously have to tell you about this one part where Paolo and his hoodrat friends smash a window to steal a diamond-studded jean jacket with tiger-print lapels and when they’re running down the street and the cops try to stop them Paolo just JUMP KICKS one. Hahahahahahaha. AND THE COP DOESN’T EVEN TRY TO REACT. He’s just as stunned as we are that this curly haired punk is ramming his foot into his chest. Hahahaha. This movie makes jumpkicking look seriously fucking cool.

SÖKARNA
Dir. Daniel Fridell & Peter Cartriers, 1993
Sweden, 108 min.
In Swedish with English subtitles

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 – 10:00 PM

Set in the world of teen delinquency, crime, drug addiction, race conflict, and violence, SÖKARNA (literally “The Searchers” or “The Seekers”) follows a couple of low-rent hoods weaned on nascent Swedish hip-hop and Taekwondo whose sole virtue is that they enjoy beating the shit out of skinheads. Existence is bleak: but after leader Jocke is sentenced to jail time for a violent mugging, life goes off the rails when he reenters society with some new friends. Jocke plunges into a world of high-stakes robberies, violent shakedowns and mob deals while smoking, snorting, shooting, and freebasing his way straight to Hell.

SÖKARNA is considered by author Daniel Ekeroth to be the explosive culmination of the trajectory of Swedish “sensationsfilms” that began in the early 1950s. At once horrifyingly disturbing and giddily cheesy, the film is a wickedly warped portrait of society on the brink set to an awesome/awful backdrop of Neneh Cherry-style Euro R&B. (Although controversial Swedish G-Funk classic “Shoot the Racist” by Infinite Mass is actually pretty hardcore. Appropriately, the movie does begin with Jocke throwing a neo-Nazi under a subway train.) SÖKARNA is further noted for its unique tone that elevates urban realism into something slightly suggesting dystopian science fiction: it’s like the Swedish BASKETBALL DIARIES with a tincture of CLASS OF 1984.

Adding to the film’s legend is the incredible fact that in 1996, nearly three years after it’s release, amateur leading man Liam Norberg—who also has a small role in STOCKHOLMSNATT and had run a Taekwondo shop with star Paolo Roberti—was convicted of of the largest cash heist in Swedish history, which had taken place in 1991. (There are undeniable shades of Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS in both this historic real-life crime and the Lucchese/Lufthansa heist as well as the films’ aesthetic exuberance.) In fact, alongside unbelievable state subsidies, Norberg’s stolen money had partially financed SÖKARNA’s production. For his role in this legendary heist, Norberg and his collaborator received whopping five year prison sentences. The third accomplice, Dragomir Mršić, recently consulted and provided his voice and likeness to the popular video Swedish video game PAYDAY 2 and even had a decent sized role in Doug Liman’s EDGE OF TOMORROW. Way to keep it real, Sweden. Norberg, meanwhile, is back in the national spotlight as an outspoken born-again Christian.