Basia and Marek have been on the run their whole lives. Along with their nine-year-old daughter Ula, they experience what it’s like to be an immigrant in Sweden. When a Swedish social worker visits their home, she witnesses Ula’s everyday reality, as seen from the perspective of the local culture. Ula is then taken away from her parents and placed in foster care. Will Basia and Marek stick together and fight for Ula? Will they succeed in rebuilding their bond and their family?

Strange Heaven

The working class girl from Landala, Gothenburg, through the fine art of theatre and all the way to Hollywood.

Gunnel Lindblom: ut ur tystnaden

One can't help wondering whether, some quarter-century ago, Carsten Brandt had the slightest inkling of the epic dimension the project he was then starting to conceive – The Gentle Pain – would take on in the subsequent decades. For it became epic in just about every sense of the word: the film is very long; it tells a multi-layered story characterised as much by its digressions as by its main narrative thread, which concerns a filmmaker’s attempts to make sense of the life of Thorkild Hansen, a Danish traveller/historian/writer internationally probably best known for his non-fiction novel Processen mod Hamsun (1978); and it took a long time to finish – and then sat on a shelf due to legal battles galore.  What is now finally revealed is a monument of modern(ist) cinema: a work that as much charts one man’s journey into his soul as a voyage of discovery into another artist’s mind.