'A Sweetness From Nowhere' Courtesy of Ester Bergsmark/Outplay A Sweetness From Nowhere. That is the title of the new film by Swedish artist Ester Bergsmark (Something Must Break), which just world premiering at the 23rd edition of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX). And as always, she merges art forms in what is described “a contemporary hybrid of forms and strategies.” So, get ready for an unusual experience that takes on the themes of assault and transphobia.
“The material is existential, lived experience rests in the body, and the political struggles are personal,” highlights a synopsis. “When there’s no other way out, we play dead – a tactic we share with jellyfish. In 2011 in Berlin, a haunting shout triggers a journey of survival. At the heart of the film is a story of lust, of finding your way back to life after being stuck in a frozen state. Through fantasy, the body, and unexpected connections between time, nature, and healing, A Sweetness From Nowhere unfolds into a joyful exploration and curious search. A pure hybrid film about transformation and healing, woven with three main threads: documentary essay, poetic facts, and evocative fable.” Directed by Bergsmark, the film was produced by Anna-Maria Kantarius for Sweden’s Garagefilm International, in co-production with SVT, Film Stockholm , Film i Väst, Stær Films and Arktisk Film Norge Invest. The cinematographers are Minka Jakerson and Bergsmark, who also edited the film with Anna Eborn, Isabella Karlström, Marion Tuor and Neil Wigart. Outplay Films is handling sales.
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“The film is very much about how darkness becomes nourishment,” Bergsmark explains. “About how we are always already entangled with the life that is constantly unfolding in and through the Earth, in the gut, beneath and around us. It is about not fully knowing who one is, and the freedom in dissolving into flesh, into rhythm, into the collective. About letting the dance floor hold you. … About being opened by the world, penetrated by it, moved by it — as estrogen enters the pores, as dance music alters the heartbeat, as the body melts into the world and still remains singular within it. The dance floor, for me, is like an ocean in which we are all waves: separate and shared at once.”
The film is also about “the human pulse that keeps so many transgender people alive today — and about its strange resonances with the non-human,” Bergsmark shares in a director’s statement. “It moves across timescales much longer than the everyday. It lingers with the contemplation of death, asking us to imagine, if only partially, the vastness of time and space that surrounds a life, and that also surrounds this very moment of experience. When you have been excluded from the category of “human”, when your belonging is pushed behind your species and beyond this era of hate, joy and desire can still be found in the midst of darkness.”
She concludes: “The film listens for those moments: flashes of sweetness that emerge where they are not supposed to exist. Life bites back. A force moves through everything like sap — running, sticky, connective. A living tissue that binds what appears separate. Places and times begin to touch one another; distinct entities brush up against each other in a kind of cosmic intimacy.”
THR can now exclusively premiere a trailer for A Sweetness From Nowhere, which allows you a small taste for the cinematic world that expects you.
Ready for some sweetness? Yes?! Then check out the trailer for the film here.
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