Måns Månsson

Over a year, we follow the former Swedish Minister of Defense, Anders Björck, in his work as governor of Uppsala County. The official position is almost 400 years old, and the job consists of sitting at a big desk, having lunch meetings with other governors, cutting ribbons at opening ceremonies, holding speeches and eating dinner with the King and Queen of Sweden. It is hard work, but someone has to do it. Björck gives the viewer full access, making this personal portrait both humorous and very, very serious.

The film follows the performative duel, or fara fara (meaning face-to-face in Lingala) between two of the DRC’s biggest stars, Koffi Olomide and Werrason. Papa Wemba announces the face-off to an enormous gathering at two adjacent stages where the superstars and their entourages compete in an epic test of musical endurance and style to see who can win by playing the longest.

Based on Kristian Lundberg's novel about Anders, who goes from acclaimed author to physical worker at the bottom of society. He can no longer support himself through his cultural work and is forced to start anew, as a worker in Malmö harbour, at a place called 'The Yard'.

Retired police detective Roland Hassel (Lars-Erik Berenett, who played Hassel on TV in the 1980s) is determined to solve the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Without access to police files, however, the best he can manage is to attend an inept re-enactment on the 25th anniversary of the murder...

The Swedish artist Måns Månsson has placed a fictional character in a real environment to explore the fascinating new relationship that has arisen between Africa and China, where democracy is one commodity among many others. No dialogue was written in advance, and the minimal story about the worthless t-shirts is just a pretext to conduct a cinematic experiment set in the Chinese city, where tens of thousands of African migrants are in the process of establishing themselves and creating a new life, in a historical parallel to the exchange that has always taken place between East and West. But this time, the West is not invited to the party. However, the reference to the lost souls in the American photographer William Eggleston's film of the same name suggests a tragicomic and existential absurdity independent of time and place.

In 1973, five men and six women drifted across the Atlantic on a raft as part of a scientific experiment exploring the origins of violence and sexual attraction. Nobody expected what ultimately took place on that 3-month journey. Through archive material and a reunion of the surviving members of the expedition, this film tells the hidden story of the project.

Kuwait’s constitution says that every person has the right to a job, so in some places 20 people are employed for one person’s job. In South Korea, they work so much that a policy has been introduced to turn off computers at the end of the day so that employees can’t work any more. In the US, they give up over 500 million holiday hours each year, while Amazon’s drivers are trying to form a union. Meanwhile, robots are poised to take over most jobs and put the rest of us out of work. Work is so crucial to our identity and what we spend our waking hours on that it is barely noticed anymore. A lot has happened since a group of Puritan priests invented the concept of work ethic in the 1600s, and in the 21st century the very concept of work is in many ways disintegrating. A perfect situation for a filmmaker like Swedish mastermind Erik Gandini, who travels the world to explore what the concept of work means today – if it means anything at all.