Under the heading Digital reflections, we botanize among documentaries that in different ways reflect a world characterized by a digital reality.

In connection with this year’s focus, Tempo has invited several different writers to formulate their views on the theme. “Thirty-three years have passed since the first digital camera and the World Wide Web were introduced to the world. As a result, the past three decades have been characterized by images and information being transmitted with increasing intensity.” Olga Ruin writes in the program magazine about the thoughts behind this year’s focus and the films included.

“I assume you who are reading this have a camera.” This is how Stig Björkman begins his initiated article about this year’s opening film And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine! which narrates the development of photography and the impact of digital life on our human self-image. See Maximilien van Aertryck and Axel Danielson’s Sundance award-winning film and come to the opening party on Monday, March 6 at Rival!

Susanne Regina Meure’s film Girl Gang is the first in-depth inside portrayal of an influencer’s working life and everyday life. Kaly Halkawt writes of the film: “It’s easy to vilify young girls who sell makeup and even more so those who consume it. Girl Gang doesn’t turn a blind eye to that criticism, but instead holds the influencer accountable for how her channels contribute to a destructive consumer culture, the film shows how the adult world encourages it.”

In this year’s focus, the image of the digital persona we present on social media is challenged and complicated. Here you can see, among other things, Manifesto, which won the award for best film in the Envision Competition at the IDFA film festival. In her innovative collage film, director Angie Vinchito has compiled videos posted on YouTube by Russian children and youth that show the oppressive society from within with completely new images. The film will be screened  in association with the DIA Saturday, March 11 with subsequent panel discussions on violence, children’s culture and documentary methods.

Theo Montoya’s debut film Anhell69 portrays a young queer generation in Medellín, Colombia. Here, the relationships between life and death move and the film’s name is taken from the deceased friend’s Instagram name that flickers by like a digital ghost. As a pre-film, Palmer Lydebrant’s Stockholm, 1982 is shown. The screening is done in collaboration with Cinema Queer, who afterwards do one of their classic bar takeovers on Thursday, March 9!

With the short film Blå Lagunen 2017, Alma Gonzalez-Campo portrays memories of summer evenings with friends and parties. The rapid cutting between blurry still images and moving videos has a new and experimental rhythm that corresponds to the feeling of scrolling through the mobile phone’s image library.

The wonderfully faded 00s aesthetic of Russian Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How To Save a Dead Friend (pictured) is the antithesis of the polished expression that dominates social media. Here is a film that, thanks to the cheap digital cameras, has been able to film a friendship over twelve years and reproduce it with a vibrating presence.

In 2013, Mia Engberg won the Tempo Documentary Award for Belleville Baby. The film was followed up with Lucky One and now forms a trilogy with the concluding part Hypermoon! “A punk-poetic visionary, perhaps that is how you can mainly describe Mia Engberg. Based on a feeling of oversaturation in the face of today’s uninterrupted flow of moving images, she investigates the visual silence not only in her films, but also in her research project The Visual Silence.” Read Julia Nilsson’s article about the films in the program catalog or on the website. Engberg’s Secrets of the Sun, which is part of the research project, will also premiere during the festival. Here, a cinematic narrative is formed that meets the spectator on his own terms in visual silence, with space to fill in with his own images and narrative. The films are shown together with the short film The Last Name of John Cage by Margaux Guillemard, with whom Engberg has collaborated over several years.

Now there is less than a month left until the festival and we can hardly wait until we get to meet in the dark of the cinema and at the same time share film experiences all over the country through the digital streaming salon Draken Film!

Read more about the films that are part of this year’s focus and about which ones are shown digitally in the program.