“Crime fiction at the service of society – on some perils in the making of a Scandinavian film town”

Crime fiction at the service of society – on some perils in the making of a Scandinavian film town

During the last decades, regional film funds and tax breaks have altered the geography of European film production. Film and other forms of audiovisual media are increasingly produced in places far from where such activities customarily occurred. Sweden may be among the countries where the tendency has had the most radical effect. More than a decade ago, regional film funds, in some cases supported by the European Union, increasingly began to host film shoots by concurrently acting as co-producers, using various means to guarantee that filming and associated activities took place in the surroundings and the studios at hand. A consequence of this ‘regional turn’ has been that the communities in which the funds are based – Trollhättan in the west, Luleå in the north and the southernmost coastal town of Ystad – have developed into ‘film towns’ of sorts (lately, a fund based in Stockholm has commenced activity to lure back production).
In this paper, Ystad, the setting of among other things thirty-two Swedish and British audiovisual productions centered on Henning Mankell’s popular detective Kurt Wallander during the last five years, will be under scrutiny. Established later than the other two funds, it has now been in operation for a decade. However, since the fund has received less financial support than its competitors while also being particularly dependent on the Wallander brand, its existence have occasionally appeared uncertain. Hence, signs of what has been termed the ‘unstable and unequal partnership between a footloose international production economy and situated local actors and intermediaries’ has been noticeable.
To counter this, however, local authorities have tried to involve the town’s residents and commercial sector in various enterprises linked to film so as to highlight the town as a location ‘permeated by film’. Accordingly, the shifting fortunes of three of these enterprises will be briefly discussed: they include the establishing of a local film fund, the creation of a locally based master’s programme in film production and a local annual film festival. The exercise will be undertaken in an effort to examine some perils associated with the growing Scandinavian phenomenon of regional film funds.