Joel Grip

The turn of a year in a snowy village in Sweden documents the need for change and continuance. A collective film about rites and times. Dala-Floda, Sweden, has 680 inhabitants. In the depths of the blue light of winter, six filmmakers ask themselves what it means to start a new year. Emerging locals formulate their views on time and our need for rituals and reoccurring events. Their answers parade poetically through the snowy and cold village landscape. A sort of time travel takes place and recalls ordinary as well as extraordinary memories and identities. The commonplace is our need for measuring time, our need for a beginning and an end. A ninety-year-old woman shows a way out of the never-ending dream phase of the evoked Phantom Carriage (Selma Lagerlöf) and exclaims: "Really, you ought to reset yourself. You have to feel completely at zero again".

Burning Bright depicts a unique gathering of musicians from the Swedish contemporary and creative music scene, and their common voyage through a torched winter landscape. Fire! Orchestra is a collective voice in which the vocal chords are plucked individually by the members. The notes, the words, and the images are torn down to be built up again. We exist to be able to enter as if the titles of the praised records spoke to us: first came "Exit", then "Enter". But how far inside can we go before we find ourselves exiting again?

At the dawn of time, explorers set out to examine the world. And even if the geographical limits of our small planet have long since been determined, there are still people who discover the world afresh.