Swedish director Stefan Jarl, perhaps the world's foremost environmental filmmaker, is preoccupied with questions of how the world will survive the onslaughts of technology and other forms of rampant modernization. Using both traditional documentary techniques as well as border-crossing narrative strategies, Jarl has been boldly exploring the medium since the late 1960s. Beginning with THEY CALL US MISFITS (1968), made in collaboration with Jan Lindkvist, Jarl made several films about troubled youth in Stockholm.
Like his films about urban malaise, his nature films investigate the economic, social, and scientific conditions troubling the land. Dealing with such subjects as farming and pollution (NATURE'S REVENGE, TIME HAS NO NAME), hunting and indigenous peoples (JÅVNA: REINDEER HERDSMAN IN THE YEAR 2000, NATURE'S WARRIOR), Jarl's nature films combine a visual and emotional romanticism about the wilderness with a clear-eyed, incisive view of the dangers brought by heedless technological intervention.
His first film about Chernobyl (THREAT, 1987) led him to investigate in other works the ongoing effects of that nuclear disaster on Europe as well as on the former USSR, master-fully blending his characteristic concerns for ecological and socioeconomic themes.
Jarl declares that a documentary filmmaker today should be a Robin Hood figure, taking money from sponsors in order to subvert their intended messages and speak instead for "people without a voice — the unseen and the unheard." And he declares, "Every director must try to change the world. When you have something to say to the world, you present it through your own eyes. God created the world, but directors can change it."
Jerry White observes that Jarl's "who le career has been pointing away towards a new model for political filmmaking, one that is [linked] tightly to the landscape, to the small details of everyday life and the effects that geopolitics have on those details, and to the quest for a lyrical and painterly visual style." Blending his concerns with both rural and urban environ-ments, “Jarl's cinema is about making these seemingly mismatched elements fit together; about insisting that only examination and reconciliation of the everyday and the system-atic will bring about any kind of meaningful understanding of the world in which we live.”
JOE MCBRIDE
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Stefan Jarl, född 18 mars 1941, dokumentärfilmare och filmregissör. Stefan Jarl är känd för att göra filmer med ett socialt engagemang. Stefan Jarl
