Sweden, like other Nordic countries, prides itself on being “colorblind” or immune to the kinds of racism found in, for example, the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, white Swedish documentarians, in the fashion of early anthropologists, recorded racial tensions amid the US civil rights movement. More recently, in the twenty-first century, short films produced by Swedes of color have tackled racism and bigotry within Sweden.
Benjamin Mier-Cruz offers a comparative study of these two periods of Swedish documentary filmmaking. “Racially innocent” white documentarians of the mid-twentieth century developed an “aesthetics of altruism” predicated on Sweden’s assumed racial equalitarianism—a notion that their documentaries in turn helped create and maintain. In contemporary films, on the other hand, Swedes of color use the same filmic format to challenge not only their predecessors’ reductionist, pseudo-anthropological presentations but also Sweden’s purportedly colorblind ideology. Mier-Cruz’s close readings of films from both eras demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of the documentary form and the ways in which it is motivated by politics and activism.