This introduction to the In Focus section ‘Runaway Scandinavia’ provides background on the phenomenon of runaway and mobile screen production and presents the four short articles that follow. As the first joint effort to address this topic, the In Focus outlines, from a range of perspectives, how the region has become increasingly shaped by global production mobility, incentive-driven competition and sustainability discourse.

The Nordic film industries offer extensive tax rebates and financial incentives to attract international runaway productions. In promotional PR surrounding these incentives, economic savings combine with colourful images of pristine natural landscapes and promises of professional crews and infrastructure. Amongst these ‘promises’ is environmental sustainability, which operates as one of the main attractions for reputation-aware international productions. Yet, runaway (or ‘mobile’) production exhibits an inherent clash between the promotional rhetoric of the incentives and the environmental impacts the productions generate. To analyse these practices, this short piece focuses on Finland, and Finnish Lapland in particular where such collaborations have been slow to develop. By offering a ‘package’ of solid infrastructure, economic stability, competitive financing and natural scenery, Film Lapland, the regional film commission, engages in competitive bidding for incoming productions but arguably undermines some of the environmental ideas it simultaneously promotes.

This short subject explores the function of irony in Woman at War (Erlingsson 2018), particularly through the lens of Paul de Man’s theory of irony and its connection to the parabasis of Attic comedy. It argues that the recurring appearance of musicians and Ukrainian chorus singers – visible only to the audience – acts as a structural interruption that breaks the film’s narrative coherence. These interventions signal a self-reflexive stance that undermines the film’s verisimilitude and complicates its engagement with environmentalist discourse in a late capitalist context. Here, irony is not merely rhetorical but also political: it exposes the gap between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inertia of state and corporate responses. The viewer is drawn into this paradox, positioned as a witness to both the collapse of narrative illusion and the spectacle of planetary collapse itself.

The success of a film depends on producers and creative teams making correct decisions during the production process. Decisions in film production create tension that arises from the internal organization of the companies, the nature of the film product and the type of decision-making processes before and during filming. Our aim is to focus on decision-making as a critical issue for production research. Furthermore, we highlight the distinctive features of the Finnish film context that may influence the way decisions are made. To this end, we combine our theoretical review with comments and reflections from an in-depth interview with the Finnish producer Jussi Rauntamäki about his multiple works. Our conceptual framework combines paradox theory with insights from film studies and cognitive science that can be used in studies aimed at unravelling paradoxes in the context of Finnish film production that are brought to light in the interview.

This article analyses Aftenlandet (Evening Land), a film made for the Danish Film Institute in 1976 by Peter Watkins, one of the world’s most politically radical directors and a pioneer of docudrama. The aim is to provide a detailed historical account of the life cycle of a key but hitherto critically neglected film in the director’s career: his last to be professionally funded for nearly 25 years and one that saw Watkins working within the very particular milieu of Denmark, investigating, often controversially, the perceived political fault lines of Danish society during the 1970s. The article traces how this English-born filmmaker came to be working in Scandinavia, details the production of Evening Land and provides a close critical reading of the film’s various themes and techniques as well as considering its reception and aftermath. Correspondence and production files from Watkins’ own personal archive reveal the difficulties the filmmaker clearly experienced as something of ‘an Englishman abroad’ attempting to find a place for himself within Scandinavian film culture of the period. The article asserts that this experience eventually contributed to Watkins’ decision to quit Scandinavia altogether following the completion of Evening Land, a decision that would inadvertently propel Watkins out of the world of professional filmmaking for nearly a quarter century. The article argues, however, that Evening Land, a film long obscure and critically neglected, still has cultural resonance and applicability to our own times in the twenty-first century.

The editorial introduces this issue of Journal of Scandinavian Cinema (JSCA) that in particular explores the representation of children and films for young audiences in the Nordic countries. The issue includes an article on the child figure in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata and an In Focus section with four short subjects about youth films in Nordic cinema, followed by an article on the representation of women in a Finnish silent film and a conference report from China. The editorial summarizes the main arguments and contributions of each article and highlights the relevance and importance of studying cinematic representation in the Nordic countries.

This article explores the new production strategies for reaching audiences currently being put into practice in the Danish screen industry. Building on studies and theories of the changed audience–industry relation following the breakthrough of streaming, this qualitative case study investigates how audience research was implemented in the production framework behind the Danish youth film Smuk (Pretty Young Thing) () to increase the film’s relevance with young audiences. The analysis highlights the differences between traditional story research and audience research as well as the challenges and opportunities of involving audience feedback in the early stages of the creative process. Finally, I discuss the implications of this new approach for classical European film industries that consider film a cultural good rather than a strictly commercial product.

Symbolic criticism is easily reduced to an act of translating meaning, remote from the style of rich narratives. Drawing on David Bordwell’s distinction between broad, overlapping functions of style, I argue that we can examine symbolic purposes as secondary to decorative and expressive purposes. I show how a theory on conceptual cognition proposed by psychologist Lawrence Barsalou can let the critic transcend firm distinctions between abstract and concrete features of a narrative. This proves especially helpful when narrative purposes are downplayed, for example in the resonant elements of art cinema, affecting how we construct and experience the storylines. I posit a framework for the analysis of symbolic purposes based on general mechanisms of memory and attentional guidance, letting us see continuity with critics such as Bordwell and Victor F. Perkins. This approach enables the critic to distinguish between degrees of symbolic power in Ruben Östlund’s The Square.

The aim of this article is to survey and re-examine writings on the emergence of television in Finnish film journals and newspapers in the 1950s and early 1960s. While film history has typically pictured film and television mainly as rivals, here the relation is discussed in terms not only of competition but also of interaction and cooperation. I classify the early writings into three groups according to the mode with which the relations between television and cinema are discussed: separationist, protectionist and cooperative. Based on this classification, I argue that it was only after 1963 that the narrative about television taking over – or, indeed, killing – cinema was retroactively established.

This article analyses Joachim Trier’s Thelma () through the concept of trauma, brought on by the title character’s perception of her sexuality as ‘deviant’ and reinforced by her rigidly religious parents’ efforts to tame it by force. Their symbolic enactment of bad parenting manifests itself in a form of Foucauldian biopower on the father’s part and as a Kristevan monstrous-feminine attitude on the mother’s. To heal from trauma, Thelma must free herself from parental control. By focalizing the narrative through Thelma’s mental subjectivity and with religious and supernatural imagery, the film expresses this process symbolically rather than figuratively.