The 2025 Scandinavian Film Festival is in full swing! From the vertiginously deep fjords of stunning Norway, to majestic Icelandic mountains, lush and dreamlike Finnish forests, and an intergenerational childhood home that becomes a setting for important metanarrative and film within a film in Joachim Trier’s multi-award-winning Sentimental Value (the collaborative effort of Norway, France, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden, the trilingual film chosen as a festival centrepiece “received a record-breaking 19-minute standing ovation” at Cannes [1] where it was awarded the Grand Prix, and was introduced by Festival Director Elysia Zeccola on the opening night in Melbourne, as the crown of the festival), the 2025 Scandinavian Film Festival is a veritable feast for the eyes.
Visually arresting promotional video from main sponsor and partner “Hurtigruten”, featured repeatedly, has become a perfect entry point into a film festival that does its very best to contribute to Scandinavian nation branding.
Accessible to audiences in Australia nationwide, the festival that runs in cinemas across Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth from 11 July to 13 August includes films that revolve around relationship dramas and societal issues (quietly unnerving and uncomfortable Beginnings, directed by Jeanette Nordahl, and Second Victims, directed by Zinnini Elkington – both starring Danish powerhouse Trine Dyrholm who was chilling in her character portrayal in Oscar-award nominated The Girl with the Needle (2024) – are, by far, the strongest films of the festival.
Second Victims likewise features an impressive Özlem Saglanmak who captivates in a low-key performance through eyes that speak larger than words). Some of the apparently lighter films of the festival use irony to comment on larger issues and dish up some black humour along the way (must-see and “sadly hilarious” Finnish 100 Litres of Gold, by Teemu Nikki, is more profound than meets the eye).
Narratives delve into troubling matters of the heart and confront psychological conundrums head on. In Everything Must Go (Arild Østin Ommundsen), Scandinavian death cleaning is not in the centre of attention but, rather, how three siblings must deal with the past after their father’s passing – as they go through his belongings, discarding one item after the other, they go down memory lane and engage in important self-reflection.
Other films explore the fluid space that is “modern love” and gender predilections (Finnish Sudden Outbursts of Emotion, directed by Paula Korva, invites us into the “bold” world of polyamory – one which explorative and free-spirited Scandinavians are quite familiar with by now.
As far as neighbouring Sweden is concerned, the “Riksdag passed a gender-neutral marriage bill in 2009, making [it] the seventh country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.”[2] The wedding between Swedish icons Eva Dahlgren and Efva Attling the same year garnered much media hype and attention nationally and abroad).
In those Scandinavian Film Festival dramas that unravel predominantly in external settings, characters manage to ultimately come up for air as the probing omni-present camera takes us on an inner journey that symbiotically merges with the outer when the external scenery moves centre stage in a directorial move that highlights far-northerners’ almost organic relationship with nature.
At ease with the natural elements to the extent that they are sometimes quite unable to leave their rugged and weatherbeaten home turf behind (as in Sakaris Stórá’s introspective drama The Last Paradise on Earth where everything changes and is in flux but the place remains the same even if, on the surface, “[e]verything is disappearing, Kári”, and which, beautifully, opens to Torshavnar Kamarkór’s haunting choir song “Aldan” (“Byrjan”), the dramatic Faroese landscape reminds of the windswept fishing village in unsettling God’s Creatures (2022) or the harsh Scottish terrain in Breaking the Waves, by vocal Danish director Lars von Trier (1997).
And in Áshtildur Kjartansdottir’s environmentally aware The Mountain, awarded the Green Film Sustainability certification, the Icelandic highlands, cosmos, and the universe enter the picture in a drama where Björk’s daughter Isadora Bjarkadottir Barney plays a lead role and grief is equalled to a “steep and rocky slope”[3]), brooding characters operate in settings that resemble the dark and enigmatic Romantic artwork of J.M. William Turner.
He famously captured the essence of light – a state of mind and soul echoed by a midnight sun that illuminates Nordic skies night and day through seemingly eternal summer months where any impending darkness is temporarily relegated to the corners of oblivion.
Selected by the 2025 Scandinavian Film Festival committee as their visual and narrative predilection for the opening night at historical Astor Theatre on 11 July, thought-provoking World War 2 drama Number 24, by renowned director John Andreas Andersen, situates the action in Nazi-occupied Norway – notoriously stuck between a rock and a hard place.
As we follow young resistance fighter Gunnar Sønsteby, we witness his journey from innocence to awareness and in that experience dive headlong into our collective human consciousness. The film raises relentless questions that beg no straight or easy answers during conditions that critically changed both the national and global playing field and the meaning of ethics as we know it.
What did it mean to be Norwegian at a divisive time of shifting political allegiances? And how did this war that never ceases to fascinate, affect those that took clear sides? Based on autobiographical account Report From #24: The Thrilling Tale of Norway’s Most Decorated World War II Hero, the film stars a convincing Sjur Vatne Brean in the lead role and gives space for brilliant actress Flo Flagerli to shine in one of the climactic final scenes (her Danish lookalike Bjørk Storm plays a key role in Beginnings).
Number 24 most definitely set the existentialist tone for a festival thus likewise concerned with lingering war trauma. Sharing thematic similarities, Never Alone (directed by Klaus Härö) sides with Jewish refugees, while Erik Poppe’s Quisling: The Final Days demonstrates how a country was undermined from within – shockingly dobbed in by its own government official, former Defence Minister Vidkun Quisling; his surname since symbolic for national betrayal.
Why the Australian fascination with Scandinavia and what does The Far North and the Hemispheric South (Australia and Aotearoa, Oceania, and the Pacific Rim) have in common? Vast open spaces, breathtaking landscapes that become a character in its own right, and a seemingly eternal sky that comes across as, alternatively, sheltering and threatening and affects the individual on a psychosocial level.
We move as one to the loud drumbeat of the Earth, and the vast geographical distances between North and South (having only recently traversed dark universes to reach Australia after a year in Sweden, I am again reminded – and struck – by how far away it is) are bridged by our mental proximity – and, with that, mutual cross-national acknowledgment and appreciation.
“On top down under”; the Australian interest in its annual Scandinavian Film Festival demonstrates just how close, and similar, we are. Therein lies the importance of film festivals that stimulate senses, that educate and show a glimpse into a society and way of life that may not be all that different from what audiences across our complex world are going through on an existential level. We are, after all, all part of the “human condition” in times of global approximation and awareness.
The 2025 Hurtigruten Scandinavian Film Festival screens in cinemas across Australia throughout July – August. For more information, including venues and screening times, visit: www.scandinavianfilmfestival.com for details.
Images: Sentimental Value (film still) | Second Victims (film still) | The Last Paradise on Earth (film still) | Number 24 (film still)
Words: Dr Jytte Holmqvist
Footnotes:
[1] www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOsUztwlvVo
[2] www.equaldex.com/region/sweden
[3] limelight-arts.com.au/reviews/the-mountain-asthildur-kjartansdottir/