10 YEAR OLD STEFAN JARL staggered out of his local cinema. What he had just witnessed was so shocking that it made him feel sick. On the screen where he usually watched matinees with Errol Flynn, he had seen an American newsreel about the German concentration camps, with thousands of dead bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. It is an event that has affected his whole life, but only now has he felt ready to meet it head on.
The desk in Stefan Jarl's office is piled high with books about one of his latest passions, Slow Food. It's typical of this inveterate champion of causes, a man who since the mid 60s has been the voice of protest in Swedish cinema. Ingmar Bergman has famously remarked that Jarl is: "One of the last great samurai who unyieldingly fights for ideals and convictions. In our 'heavy industry' there aren't many like him."
Outside the window, silence reigns. In the neighbouring meadow one or two horses are grazing, a bird of prey hovers in the sky. Stefan Jarl has moved back to his childhood haunts deep in the countryside, two hours away by train from the nearest city, Gothenburg. His closest neighbour in the tiny village of Forshem happens to be only the second restaurant in Sweden to be awarded a Slow Food diploma. And Jarl is currently working on a book together with the restaurateur.
"I’m also making a 20-minute protest film entitled
Kor är fina, (Cows are Nice). Travelling through southern Sweden last year, it suddenly struck me. When did I last see a cow? OK, so you see plenty of hefty beef cattle, but milk cows, where are they? EU membership is killing off our country's dairy farmers."
Nature and civilization. A need to rise up in resistance, to take a stand against injustice. A natural inclination to side with the underdog and an unshakable belief that art really can change the world. It all began here in the Swedish countryside when Stefan Jarl heard on the radio that president Patrice Lumumba had been assassinated. The leader of what was then the Belgian Congo had become something of a hero for the young Jarl. Lumumba was the man who was going to 'sort Africa out'. Stefan Jarl took the news badly. There was something rotten out there in the big wide world. And it would soon be time for him to try to do something about it.
On the same radio he had also heard Eugene O' Neill's
Long Day's Journey into Night. Many years later he realized that there was a link between Mary Tyrone's morphine addiction and his own desire to depict how drugs destroy people's lives in works such as
They Call us Misfits (Dom kallar oss mods) and
A Decent Life (Ett anständigt liv), the first two films in his "Mods Trilogy", works which firmly established Jarl on the international stage as one of Sweden's major directors.
Only recently has he started to make the connections between his early impressions and the films he subsequently went on to make.
HIS LATEST FEATURE,
The Girl from Auschwitz (Flickan från Auschwitz) is about the journalist Cordelia Edvardson, born in Germany in 1929, who ended up as a teenager in that most notorious of all concentration camps.
"Ever since I saw those dreadful images l've wanted to talk to someone who survived the camps. That was my burning desire when I met Cordelia Edvardson, who has written books and numerous articles about her experiences, accepted the invitation to take part in the film. Stefan Jarl's curiosity was intense - the questions just poured out of him.
"I behaved like a bull in a china shop, and managed to knock down most of the shelves before I realized what I was doing. I don't know how she put up with me. I felt rather embarrassed afterwards."
Jarl wanted to know how it's possible to become something more than a prisoner of the past. He realised that Cordelia Edvardson had succeeded in doing so. With her background, she might easily become a propagandist for Israel, but instead she has become a writer who sees both sides. Her talent has a tendency to irritate the Zionist lobby.
"There are two ways you can go. Either you can be bitter and complain that life's not fair, or you can move on. Cordelia chose to defeat the past. And what's fascinating is that she, a woman with a good job and five children, decided to break away from Sweden and go to live in Jerusalem. She probably felt that the past was slowly catching up with her, that she needed to take on something new. For her it's always a question of meeting the challenges that fate throws at her. And of never allowing herself to be defeated, something people are otherwise so prone to do."
In some ways, all of Stefan Jarl's films are about people on the edge of society. People who are survivors. He has a profound belief that ultimately each one of us is responsible for our own life.
"OK, you should complain about society, but you shouldn't use that as a means. You can't just sit out in the ghetto suburbs and say there's nothing we can do, they've put us here and every Swede is a racist. There's always something you can do. There are plenty of examples. Just look at the guy who opened a school in one of Stockholm's suburbs and taught immigrants how to apply for jobs, how to-dress for interviews and what to say. 80 per cent who left that school got jobs! Now he runs loads of classes."
STEFAN JARL LOVES firebrands. He waxes lyrical about the medics who put their lives on the line in Médecins sans Frontières.
"Their mums and dads must think they're mad. But those people who go off and work round the dock under the most dreadful conditions are real heroes. I mean, three million people die every year from Aids - yet despite these terrible odds, they still go down to Africa to tend to the sick. lt's amazing."
A product of the left wing movement in Swedish film of the 1960s, Stefan Jarl is still a committed socialist. He's also a strong individualist, a man who runs his own company, produces his own films, and who elected to go his own way instead of taking up a job with Swedish Television (SVT), an option that was open to him in the 70s.
"I’ve always thrown Marx and Pippi Longstocking together into the mixer. They're in every dish I serve up. I'm sure I'd have made twice as many films if I'd worked at SVT. But if you're a contrary type like Pippi, you can't get away with that there."
Now approaching his 65th birthday, Stefan Jarl is tortured by the notion that time is running out. Not to put too fine a point on it, he's counting backwards to see how many films he might still be able to make.
"It makes me feel more and more uncomfortable. In a recent interview I counted up 15 unmade films. It’s a real pain that life is so damned short."
Asked how he's changed as a filmmaker over the years, Jarl insists that essentially his need to offer resistance has grown. "But there's nothing I'm really satisfied with, if that's what you're wondering. For every film I watch I ask myself: why didn't I do such and such instead...?"
In recent years he has put considerable time and energy into releasing his entire works on DVD. He felt a need to save his films, and in doing so he had to watch all of them again.
"It was hell, I can tell you. Nobody should put themselves through something like that."
STEFAN JARL SHOWS ME his latest short,
Epilogue, which is due to premiere at the Göteborg Film Festival. It's a compelling piece in which Patrik, the son of Kenneth "Kenta" Gustafsson, one of the mods from the eponymous trilogy, is attending the church christening of his own son. Kenta himself wasn't there. He died back in 2003, but one of his grandson's names is Kenneth. This is an emotional signal of reconciliation from Patrik, who hasn't always been willing to accept Kenta as his father.
Nowadays, Stefan Jarl mostly concentrates on shorts. Funding from the commissioners at the Swedish Film Institute for documentaries has been reduced.
"The Girl from Auschwitz cost 2.5 million kronor (266,000 euros) to make, which was only possible because a great deal of it was shot on video. But my priority now is to get as much done as possible, so I can't afford to waste two years trying to raise money for a feature. It's better to spend that time making shorts, that way I can say something at least. Because it's still possible to get funding for short films. And it also frees me up for relatively cheap projects like the book about Slow Food."
As if on cue, the telephone rings in his office. It's the local restaurant. They're just about to prepare a special fish (something like an anchovy) that's found in nearby Vänern, Sweden's biggest lake.
"They're about to gut the fish. I'd better get over there and take some pictures..." Slinging his camera over his shoulder, Stefan Jarl takes his leave.
Last month he was in San Francisco at a retrospective of all his films. Today he's off to photograph a small fish, passionate in his conviction that it's better to eat local produce than food flown in from Norway or New Zealand.
Watching him as he disappears, I wonder how many documentary filmmakers Stefan Jarl's international stature could be bothered with such a seemingly small thing.
Michael Moore? I don't think so.
/Mats Weman
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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
