19/06/2023 - Swedish director Ami-Ro Sköld’s film is a drama about work, welfare and integration policies whose troubling nature is amplified by the use of stop motion animation

The 2022 September elections brought about the sharpest shift in Sweden’s recent history. The Social Democrats lost the leadership and, for the very first time, the Far Right led by Jimmie Åkesson gained real political power. “The country I grew up in is nothing but a memory now. It has been destroyed by a coalition formed of spineless conservatives and opportunistic liberals, and dominated by far-right extremists. And the Social Democrats, who devised and built the Swedish welfare state, have no idea how to change this state of affairs”, Karin Pettersson writes in The New Statesman. Sweden has the highest murder rate in western Europe as a result of ferocious wars between incredibly young criminal gangs in the suburbs and peripheries where the Far Right triumphed. The Swedish paradise of openness and equality no longer exists. And if we needed additional proof of the 360-degree failure of the “Swedish model” of welfare and integration, we should look no further than The Store by Ami-Ro Sköld, which enjoyed its premiere at the IFFR and is now showcasing in Bologna’s Biografilm Festival, after its national release in April.

The Store isn’t just a drama about labour market policies, it’s the representation of the lowest point of the social parabola (anticipated by Erik Gandini in his 2015 documentary The Swedish Theory of Love). The film is set in a discount supermarket within an unspecified Swedish town, ironically named Smart, where a multiracial group of immigrant workers are employed. The director and screenwriter depicts her own personal experience of working as a store manager, entrusting this role to her protagonist Eleni, a single mother forced to return to work while still breastfeeding her baby, and put under unbearable pressure by her boss (Fredrik Evers) to fire less productive employees and reduce working hours. Eleni is played by Swedish model and actress Eliza Sica, who boasts the perfect angel-demon face for the role and just the right talent required to play a young woman torn between loyalty to her colleagues and necessity.

Given the film’s naturalistic mise en scène approach, it could easily have been a paranoid documentary about the ravages caused by neoliberal politics. The added value here is the use of stop motion animation alternated with live acting, which allows the director to push the troubling, horrific effect of the exploitation and dehumanisation we see in the movie, to its extreme limit. These stop motion puppets are made using a kind of waxy plastic, which results in easily-manipulated figures and depersonalised faces, contorted by the stress of potentially losing their jobs. Or famished zombies, as is the case with the discount store’s customers, who run towards the refrigerators crammed with low-cost, frozen chicken. In a crescendo of frustration and shattered dreams, the merchandise rots and implodes symbolically, like an effervescent blob.

Over the course of its two-hour run-time, Sköld’s film also develops secondary narrative arcs on the lives of some of its other characters. In addition to Eleni, harshly criticised by her mother for neglecting her child, there’s also Eva (Linda Faith), Eleni’s oldest employee and main target, and Jackie (Daysury Valencia), who’s hiding her pregnancy in order to keep her job. A more developed character comes in the form of single father Aadin (Arbi Alviati), who’s trying to take care of his two daughters while battling with debt collection agencies. Aadin strikes up a relationship with Zoya (Eleftheria Gerofoka), a woman who raids the supermarket’s expired food bins every night, which are the only means of survival for the community of homeless people living along the polluted river. The director highlights the contrast between this tragic class struggle between colleagues and the happy pauperism of those living outside of the job market and any other socio-economic context, providing Sköld with a segue into the environmental theme. The cast’s various performances feel incredibly natural and emotionally involving, albeit anxiety-inducing. But, at the end of the film, Sköld sends out a weak message of optimism, voicing her trust in the younger generations.

The Store is a Swedish-Italian co-production by Onoma Productions, Indyca, Film i Väst and GötaFilm, alongside Norway’s Fidalgo Film Production. Fandango are heading up international sales.

(Translated from Italian)