In early May 1986, Jarl and his crew travelled to Lapland to scout 10-locations for Good People, his fiction debut. Following on the heels of the Chernobyl disaster, Jarl temporarily abandoned his fictional film in favor of filming the effects of the radioactive fallout on the Lapp people. The original tide, Uhkkádus, in Lapp means "encroachment" rather than "threat" and refers more to the violation of the Lapp atti-tude toward life than to the poisoning of their pastures and water. Threat/Uhkkádus was the last film to show Lapps who lived traditio-nally. The Lapp chronology is now thought of in terms of before and after Chernobyl.
“One of the most important documentaries of recent times.”
/Los Angeles Life
“Superb. .. magnificent... This austere, exquisitely photographed film packs a real aesthetic wallop just because every frame is charged with a sense of loss and haunting pictorial beauty.”
/Los Angeles TimesStefan Jarl´s "Threat" is a swedish movie made in 1987 and never released in the United States. “Threat" has the sort of subject – the decimation of the Lapplander reindeer herds after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the devastating effect of this environmental poissoning on traditional Lapp culture – that sounds as if it might make a good one-liner on the David Letterman show – or perhaps in a George Bush presedential campaign. Who, after all, really cares about the Lapplanders, or their reindeer, or their way of life, or anything else happening an ocean and a continent away, in strange climes and other languages?
It´s the genius of Stefan Jarl – who may be the greatest “unknown" documentary filmmaker currently at work (unknown, at least, in the U.S.) – that he makes us see, feel and intensely experience subjects so seemingly foreign and esoteric. “Threat" is an ecological documentary, but that is only it´s first level. It´s also a tragic ballad, a portrait of a people forced to stare into the abyss, and a fresco of natural wonders and staggering sights that perhaps are being lost to all of us. One sequence, where we watch the dead reindeer being ferried off on helicopters like broken dolls lifted mechanically up into a somber sky, is as beautiful and heartbreaking as any recent film has given us. Like many great documentarians – like Robert Flaherty, like Humphrey Jennings, and like Jarl´s own countryman and inspiration, Arne Sucksdorff – Jarl is a lyricist and a storyteller as much as a recorder of facts and the visible world. And his major theme – in “Threat" and his other films – is the tragedy of modern life, the destruction of natural impulse and beauty, of tradition, of simplicity. In the vast an stunning landscapes of "Threat" he shows us a shadow and a warning: This beaty may die. This world may vanish. These animals, these men and women, these children, may disapear.
/Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times
"The Threath" article by Mats Nilsson»Shop
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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
