IFFR Live: Amateurs

How can a stuffy local Swedish council lure a popular major company like Superbilly? How do you make sure that this German budget retail chain sets up shop in the town of Lafors, and not in its competitor, Alingsås? With a sparkling commercial, of course, putting the high points of Lafors on show.

But that isn’t easy, as soon becomes apparent. Because what can you show about this colourless town? Can you paint a wooden hut red, because it looks nice and authentically Swedish, and keep the multicultural residents off camera? And who decides that, anyway? Two local adolescent girls armed with mobile phones have very different ideas from the director flown in from Stockholm by the council. The whole Superbilly project stokes confrontation within the town. In the tragi-comic Amateurs, Gabriela Pichler (Eat Sleep Die) investigates the power of images in a globalised society.