Before the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements became headline-making hashtags, film industry leaders in the Nordic countries already were taking revolutionary steps to improve the representation of women in film, both in front of and behind the lens. In 2013, some of Sweden’s major movie theaters introduced a new ratings system based on the Bechdel Test, which requires a film to have two named female characters who talk to one another about something other than a man. Then in 2015, Swedish Film Institute CEO Anna Serner announced that her agency had achieved gender parity among the directors, producers, and screenwriters of SFI-funded films. One reason female filmmakers are so important, she argued, is that women’s stories have been historically underrepresented and thus provide both the freshness and the resonance that today’s oversaturated media market craves. This talk explores this thesis through the work of a number of prominent contemporary Nordic female filmmakers, including Susanne Bier, Annette K. Olesen, Gabriela Pichler, and Lisa Langseth.


Ursula Lindqvist is Associate Professor of Scandinavian Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where she also contributes to interdisciplinary programs in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies; Film and Media Studies; Comparative Literature; and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies. She is the author of Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor: Contemplating the Art of Existence, published in the University of Washington Press' Nordic Film Classics series. She is also co-edito of two recent critical anthologies: A Companion to Nordic Cinema, with Wiley-Blackwell, and New Dimensions of Diversity in Nordic Culture and Society, with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Her research has also appeared in a number of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, including Space and Culture, Modernism/modernity, and African and Black Diaspora. She has been interviewed on Nordic cinema topics for stories in the New York Times and on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, and she was an invited keynote speaker on women in Swedish film at the Milwaukee International Film Festival in 2015.