Swedish films about pain

When Astrid Lindgren was very young something happened that affected her profoundly, and this combination of both miracle and calamity came to shape her entire life. It was an event that transformed her into one of the most inspiring women of our age and the storyteller a whole world would come to love. This is the story of when a young Astrid, despite the expectations of her time and religious upbringing, decided to break free from society's norms and follow her heart.

A film between fiction and reality, highlighting questions about group dynamics and established hierarchies. A group of people meet for their high school reunion 20 years later. One of them talks about her being bullied and outcast and soon the former classmates fall back to the roles they used to have back in school. But this is just half of the film.

On a foggy day, Julia's six-year-old son Jens is called missing. Despite a thorough search, the boy is never found. Twenty years later, Julia’s father receives one of the shoes Jens was wearing the day he disappeared. Who sent it? Why? Is the boy still alive? This inexplicable act suddenly awakens a hope in Julia that she might see her son again… or that she could find his body and murderer. As she returns to her father’s island, she hears stories of the mythical Nils Kant – a murderer who once was the terror of the island. He is dead and buried for years, long before Julia’s son disappeared. But Julia’s father uncovers that his death and burial were only a fake. While on his tracks, Julia accepts the help and love of Lennart, a local police inspector. His dark and mysterious past brings him a lot closer to Jens’s disappearance that she might think…

Elle Marja, 14, is a reindeer-breeding Sami girl. Exposed to the racism of the 1930s and phrenological examinations at her boarding school, she starts dreaming of another life. To achieve this other life she has to become someone else and break all ties with her family and culture.

Tom (8) and Benjamin (11) travel to Stockholm to spend the summer with their father, whom they have barely seen since he divorced their mother. Tom, in particular, knows next to nothing about this strange, solitary man who seems never to sleep. When he suggests they spend a few days at his cabin in the country, the boys are delighted. But the cabin is totally isolated in the middle of a huge forest, a place both beautiful and troubling.

Duct tape, electrical cables, trigger, explosives. Sebbe never planned to build a bomb. It just happened. Sebbe is 15 years old and lives with his mother in an apartment that is too narrow. He does his best. He never strikes back. Sebbe loves his mother because he knows nothing else. In the junkyard the dream is alive, and in the hands of Sebbe, dead objects come to life. Here he has the power to create. Here he is free - but alone. His isolation grows as his world shrinks, until one day he is completely isolated with no other than his mother. And when she falls, everything falls.

On a hiking trip to rekindle their marriage, a couple find themselves fleeing for their lives in the unforgiving wilderness from an unknown shooter.

The 1992 Danish football team competes for the European Championship.

A dead body is found and police detective Mårten Späck draws the conclusion that a serial suicide killer is at large. Späck with his colleagues Grünvald Karlsson and Irene Snusk suspect a gang who distributes pirated DVD's of 'bottom-of-the-barrel' Swedish movies.

A tone-deaf cop works to track down a group of guerilla percussionists whose anarchic public performances are terrorizing the city.

Five men break into Frank Wagner's apartment. Frank is able to escape and seeks out the help of Johan Falk. Has someone leaked that Frank is working with the police? Frank and John don't know who knows what and whom to trust.

Alena’s life is far from simple. When she arrives at her new elite boarding school, Filippa and the other girls start to harass her. But Alena’s best friend Josefin won’t let her take anymore beating. If she won’t strike back, Josefin will do it for her. Hard.

A young Eastern European immigrant working in Sweden is faced with a painful choice when she's laid off from her factory in the name of "efficiencies."

Despite grumpy 59 year-old Ove being deposed as president of his condominium association, but he keeps looking over the neighbourhood with an iron fist. When pregnant Parvaneh and her family move into the terraced house opposite Ove and she accidentally back into Ove’s mailbox, it sets off a series of unexpected changes in his life.

December 1942. Two young soldiers leave their posts at checkpoint 83 in North Värmland, Sweden and make their way through the ice cold winter night towards the Nazi-occupied Norwegian border. Sweden stands on the brink of invasion and they want to see the enemy everybody's talking about. But the adventure ends in disaster and soon thereafter Lieutenant Aron Stenström finds out that his brother Sven is one of the missing soldiers. With the odds stacked against him he is forced to go behind enemy lines on a secret rescue mission. Deep inside the Norwegian forests Aron realizes that a completely different kind of line must be crossed if they're to come out alive.

A lonely hotel by a lonely road. Sarah is lost, looking for somewhere to sleep. She's come to the wrong place. A lonely hotel by a lonely road. Sarah is lost, Jenny is looking for her. She's come to the right place. The Bridgeburn Hotel

Just as Stella enters the exciting world of adolescence she discovers that her big sister and role model Katja is hiding an eating disorder. The disease slowly tears the family apart. A story about jealousy, love and betrayal told with warmth, depth and laughter - on and off the ice.

Thirteen year-old Nils Holgersson is bored dwelling on a farm with his parents. Instead of helping on the farm, he prefers to play pranks and tease animals. One day life unexpectedly changed Nils...

Mikko Virtanen feels like a Swedish soul trapped in a Finnish body. Full of disgust for everything Finnish, he sees Sweden as heaven. Upon meeting a suicidal Swedish psychologist Mikael Anderson, he seizes an opportunity for an identity switch. Raspberry Boat Refugee is a comedy about cultural differences in the Nordic countries, their nationalism and, not least, prejudices about our neighbours. It also proves how futile it is to try to escape oneself.

In a small mining community in Northern Sweden, a group of youngsters about to take the leap in the adult age fight with themselves and the world around, while the ground literally trembles under their feet.

"Monica Z" is a biopic about the Swedish singer and actress Monica Zetterlund focusing on her journey from a job as a telephone operator in a small town in Sweden to stardom in the clubs of New York and Stockholm.

Helen, a priest, is approached by scientist Lisbeth with a desperate plea for help. A young man, who has been sent to a high security psychiatric ward after having killed an old couple, has attempted suicide while rambling about God. Having been part of an experiment attempting to humanize inmates by assigning them pets, the young man has suddenly gone ballistic. Fearing that he will attempt suicide again priest and scientist must now confront their mutual animosities while trying to grasp the truth. In a race against time the two women begin a shocking journey deeper and deeper into the sick mind of a young man's soul.

Based on the first book in Jussi Adler-Olsen's bestselling thriller series about Department Q THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES tells the story of the two policemen Carl Mørck and Assad who become involved in a five-year-old case concerning a missing woman, Merete. Soon Carl and Assad are on a journey through Scandinavia's darkest corners to find a psychopathic killer.

After living a long and colorful life, Allan Karlsson finds himself stuck in a nursing home. On his 100th birthday, he leaps out a window and begins an unexpected journey.

A three-tiered story centered around drugs and organized crime, and focused on a young man who becomes a runner for a coke dealer.

A late summer night in 1990 a young pregnant woman is brutally murdered by being buried in the sand, to slowly become submerged by the tide. 25 years later, the sadistic murder remains unsolved. Olivia Rönning receives the task of studying the case as a cold case exercise at the Police Academy. Olivia becomes almost obsessed with the murder when she discovers that her father previously worked with the investigation. She quickly realizes that she must get a hold of the principal investigator, detective Tom Stilton, but he seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old student in Sweden, started a school strike for the climate as her question for adults was, if you don’t care about my future on earth, why should I care about my future in school? Within months, her strike evolved into a global movement as the quiet teenage girl on the autism spectrum becomes a world-famous activist.

India, 1918. On the outskirts of Tumbbad, a cursed village where it always rains, Vinayak, along with his mother and his brother, care of a mysterious old woman who keeps the secret of an ancestral treasure that Vinayak gets obsessed with.

Bröderna Hårdrock is a film about two brothers who are planning a heavy metal convention in their sleepy village. Their mother, the village priest, worries about them and wants them to settle down and have families. A young female teacher and line dance instructor in the village sets both their hearts beating faster and, unaware of each other's feelings, they enter a battle to win her affections.

Puck has been invited by her tutor at the university to celebrate midsummer at his secluded cottage on an island together with a group of friends, among them Einar Bure. Puck and Einar are having a secret relationship, and he is the reason she says yes to the invitation. Having been out on a romantic spree with Einar, Puck finds one of the female guests murdered. Einar contacts his friend Christer Wijk, but upon Christer's arrival, the dead body has disappeared. The contact with the outside world is broken when the island's only boat goes missing. They are trapped on the island - and someone among them is a killer...

Erika is mentally bruised and starts group therapy with people seeking absolute anonymity.

Detectives and best friends Andreas and Simon lead vastly different lives; Andreas has settled down with his beautiful wife and son; while Simon, recently divorced, spends most of his waking hours getting drunk at the local strip club. But all that changes when the two of them are called out to a domestic dispute between a junkie couple, caught in a vicious cycle of violence and drugs. It all looks very routine – until Andreas finds the couple's infant son, crying in a closet. The usually collected policeman finds himself confronted with his own powerlessness and is shaken to his core. As Andreas slowly loses his grip on justice, it suddenly becomes up to the unruly Simon to restore the balance between right and wrong.

A story about a young girl who leaves her hometown to pursue her dream of becoming a famous punk artist.

An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a missing list of double agents.

A ship carrying settlers to a new home on Mars after Earth is rendered uninhabitable is knocked off-course, causing the passengers to consider their place in the universe.

A visionary romance based on a contemporary reading of Dante.

A focuses on 1957, one of the most prolific years for the Swedish director. During the year he shot two films, opened two of his most celebrated films (The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries), and produced four plays and a TV movie while juggling with a complicated private life.

At the edge of Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula, two women’s lives will intersect – for a brief moment – while trapped in circumstances unforeseen. Between a struggling Icelandic mother and an asylum seeker from Guinea-Bissau, a delicate bond will form as both strategize to get their lives back on track.

A 14-year-old boy in a stifling Helsinki slum takes some unwise life lessons from his soon-to-be-incarcerated older brother, in Finnish master Pirjo Honkasalo’s gorgeously stylized and emotionally devastating work about what we pass on to younger generations, and the ways we do it.

Maggie and Carsten love each other, they have two wonderful children and run their own gourmet restaurant; Malus. They want it all. And they have it all. Almost. They are missing the coveted Michelin Star. It has been their dream, on which they gambled everything to win. One day Carsten receives a letter saying that his wife loves somebody else. But who sent the letter and why? In their continuous passion and pursuit for the ultimate recognition, they forget that the meals of life are best enjoyed together.

In her quest to uncover the wrongdoings of the Russian authorities, Anna Politkovskaya inspired awe in some and fear in countless others. At age 48 she was assassinated for simply doing her job. This documentary is based on Anna's conversations with filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya, Anna's former university professor and personal friend. Shot over a period of 20 years, this exclusive footage creates an incredible story of a woman who consciously gave her life for her convictions.

A small group of Wikileaks journalists make their way through Central Asia interviewing newspaper editors. Their real goal: to find local media outlets to publish secret US diplomatic cables. This intelligent, guerrilla-style doc follows their fascinating journey from Afghanistan to Manhattan, through the boundaries of free speech and the minds of those who shape our understanding of the world.

Sarah, her boyfriend and his five-year-old son Lucas move into a semi-detached house. But the other side is haunted by something evil, who wants Lucas at all costs. Inspired by real events.

Nelly and her dog London are about to spend autumn break with her uncle Hannibal. Soon she noticed that he doesn't live a quiet life. Her uncle is a Monster agent. Nelly gets dragged in to an adventure filled with ghosts, vampires and werewolves.

Romantic comedy from Academy Award winner Susanne Bier (Brothers, In a Better World), about two very different families brought together for a wedding in a beautiful old Italian villa.

Eric, an ordinary man in his mid 30's with an ordinary job wins a large sum of money playing the lottery. Despite his total lack of talent, he quits his job and sets off to learning how to play soccer. Eric firmly believes that if he spends 10 000 hours of training on what he sets his mind to, he can master just about anything.

During the last two years of her life, Princess Diana campaigns against the use of land mines and has a secret love affair with a Pakistani heart surgeon.

In a not too distant future, a totalitarian state run by ‘The Director” (Seagal) controls all aspects of life. All enemies of the state are dealt in the harshest way. Most of them are executed by the secret government’s assassins. The best operative is code-named “Condor” (Messner) – an elite agent and hit man for the government. However, in his latest assignment, “Condor” fails to kill an opposition leader, and finds himself on the run from the very same government agency that he works for. This sets in motion a chain of events with unforseen consequences for all involved.

This drama follows Inspector Kurt Wallander – a middle-aged everyman – as he struggles against a rising tide of violence in the apparently sleepy backwaters in and around Ystad in Skane, southern Sweden. Based on the international best-selling books by Henning Mankell.