04/07/2005

This year, the Brussels European Film Festival allows the public to discover many Scandinavian productions. One of the most interesting is definitely the first feature of the young Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, who studied at the Danish Film School.

Babylon Disease (Babylonsjukan), an urban film about sentimental and existential exile, opens on a televised report on demonstrators fought against by the police. These violent images, a blunt version of the tensions in the Western society, are followed by a zoom on the sad, pure, and defenceless-looking face of Maja (Nina Wähä). The camera silently follows her eyes, gazing outside the image into reality as something inherently harsh, as the gravity of her expression indicates. Maya, homeless since her boyfriend threw her out to go to India, lives at Matthias' (Kalled Mustonen), in a flat where friends of all origins hang out and party constantly. The purposelessness and pain these wounded souls try to forget by throwing their meaningless bodies into a world of excess and madness (for planning to abduct the leader of the Swedish extreme-right, for instance, is pure madness...) actually echo Maja's inner turmoil. Babylon Disease is a grave yet not humourless vision of the huge gap between reality and our aspirations, a gap where pain and melancholy usually lie.

This film, produced by Lars Lindström for Nordisk Film Production AB (SE) and supported by the Danish Film Institute as well as the Swedish Film Institute is already a success in Scandinavia and in the East-European countries where the film has already been released, a good sign for Nordisk Film, in charge of international sales.

[cf. also the interview: Daniel Espinosa]

(Translated from French)