This article provides an overview of the polemics surrounding the politics of representation in Ruben Östlund's film Play (2011). It contextualizes the media debate, which focused on the film's depiction of black children, and analyses its significance within the context of Swedish contemporary film culture and criticism.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between film, space, place, cultural identity and collective memory in the digital era. I will discuss archival images of the Swedish city of Malmö – like Liverpool, the city portrayed in Terence Davies 2008 documentary Of Time and the City, a port city now associated with arts and urban regeneration – in the DVD series Mitt hjärtas Malmö (‘The Malmö of My Heart’ (2005-2011) and on its website (mitthjartasmalmo.se). Furthermore, I will compare the local initiative Mitt hjärtas Malmö with a national project, the recently created online viewing portal Filmarkivet.se. Exemplifying an increasing drive to facilitate access to national collections through digitalization, Filmarkivet.se provides access to films from the collections of the Swedish Film Institute and the National Library and claims to reflect the history of the 20th century in Sweden. But to what extent does it reflect the history of Sweden’s third largest city?

This paper will explore sensations of the real presented in films produced by the Gothenburg-based company Plattform, established by the filmmakers Ruben Östlund and Erik Hemmendorff in 2002. Since then Plattform has made a number of noteworthy independent Swedish films; some of them fictional, some documentary; all sharing an interest in the borders between fact and fiction. The main focus of my paper will be Östlund’s internationally recognised feature films, in particular Play (2011), winner of the Coup de Coeur at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and Involuntary (De Ofrivilliga, 2008). However, the individuals involved with Plattform contribute to each other’s projects in various ways, and therefore my discussion will also reference films by other directors.When interviewed about their production methods and aesthetic ideals, the Plattform filmmakers tend to use words like ’true’, ’authentic’ ’genuine’ and other (similarly worn-out) expressions closely associated with realism. Amateur actors, static long takes, location shooting in recognisable urban settings, improvised dialogue, people on the street looking into the camera, sequences in real-time, background noises – all of these formal strategies have been used to signify the real before. Nevertheless, there is something very distinct and particular about the realism in Östlund’s films. This paper will explore the relationship between the world of the audience and the materiality of the screen in these film examples with theoretical help from phenomenology (Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts, 2004) and new approaches to realism (Nagib’s World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, 2011) in an attempt to contextualise Östlund’s realist aesthetics as well as the intense journalistic debate around Play’s representation of ethnicity following its Swedish cinema release in November 2011.