Sweden: Overview

...Swede smell of success

Always one megabyte ahead of the digital crowd, Sweden continues to be a creative force in the online world. But has the country’s technical brilliance overshadowed its directorial legacy? And is there more to Swedish creativity than just cyber superiority? Danny Edwards reports.

Moving in a new direction

Sweden has a rich history of producing great advertising directors and many are still at the top of their game, but the country’s thriving digital arena may mark a shift in focus as business picks up after the economic slowdown. As a country that leads the way in creative innovations, Sweden has a tried-and-tested history. For many years, Sweden has produced interesting, often avant-garde directors who have not only risen to the top of their profession in their native country, but crossed borders and managed to reign confidently overseas too. Think Traktor, Jonas Åkerlund, the late Johan Camitz and this issue’s featured directors, Johan Renck and Fredrik Bond.

Many Swedish directors, the aforementioned included, still ply their trade at the pinnacle of advertising’s summit. But to counter that, there’s an underlying worry that Sweden’s focus has shifted and that it is now producing digital greats, rather than directorial talent. ‘Worry’, though, may be the wrong word. Being at the forefront of the digital age and being able to produce intelligent, inventive and confidently experimental digital creatives isn’t something to lose sleep over. But while much of this Sweden special deals with the advancement and landscape of the digital arena, can Sweden continue its uncanny trick of developing another generation of top advertising directors?

Breeding ground for talent

Pia Dueholm, executive producer at Partizan’s recently opened Stockholm office, thinks it can. Partizan is the company that brought Traktor to the masses and also has fellow Swedes Thomas Hilland and Patrick Bergh on its roster. Dueholm is confident that while the office will benefit from the creativity of the agencies in Sweden, it can’t discount the possibility of unearthing some more directorial gems too. “[Sweden] has always been an amazing centre for creativity,” she says. “We are big fans of the work coming out of agencies such as DDB, Forsman & Bodenfors and Åkestam Holst. Not only is it a great market for commercials, but there is also a lot of innovation going on that we think will tie in nicely with our Darkroom division and, of course, we also know it’s a great breeding ground for directorial talent.”

However, Filip Nilsson, director and partner at Folke Film, is unsure whether Sweden’s directors’ time has been and gone, or rather that, while Sweden still has a surfeit of talented directors, it can no longer claim to own the monopoly on them. “I think those days are over,” he says. “Swedes are not better than anyone else. Not so many years ago, Swedes could get a job from, for example, a French client because they wanted 'the Nordic light and dark humour'. We had a romanticised aura around us for years, which was super strange. We got jobs because we were Swedes, not only because of our reels.”

Lasting appeal

There are, of course, fads and trends in many industries and it’s possible that Swedish directors benefited from that at some point, although that shouldn’t reflect badly on their obvious skills, then or now. Indeed, the reels of Swedish directors are still very strong and you only have to look at places such as ACNE or directors such as Hobby Films’ Oskar Bard or Folke’s own Andreas Nilsson to see that Swedish directors shouldn’t hang up their megaphones just yet.

In fact, Dueholm isn’t convinced that the appeal of Swedish directors has yet worn off. “It seems that the pared-back Scandinavian style never really goes out of fashion,” she says. “That, along with their sense of humour, seems to be a winning formula.” Henrik Lagercrantz, managing director of Stockholm-based production company Social Club, which itself represents some top Swedish names, believes that while the talent isn’t in question, the cross-market appeal might be. “There are some really very good Swedish directors at the moment,” he states, “but whether they are going to make it big internationally, who knows? Competition is pretty fierce now, certainly more so than it was.”

Business overall for Sweden’s production community seems to have picked up over recent months, however. Like most other regions, Sweden was hit by the recent economic downturn and saw scripts and projects become much thinner on the ground or, sometimes, strangled of their creativity. “The last couple of years, up to the middle of 2010, were terrible because of the economy,” states Lagercrantz. “I think it hit here pretty hard, as much as anywhere, and, of course, the budgets were really low, but creatively it was bad too because everybody was scared of what was happening. But then by March/April of this year, it suddenly felt like someone had turned on a switch and we were overloaded with work, and creatively too, Sweden picked up some speed.”

Open minded

“The creativity has been lower,” agrees Nilsson. “The budgets too. But from our point of view, as a fairly new company on the Swedish market, it has been pretty good. The upside of the Swedish industry is that clients and agencies, most of the time, are open minded and very collaborative, which can turn a mildly good script into a really good script.” And while the shining light of innovation might have moved from directors to digital creatives, many of the ideas produced by these Swedish wunderkinds still need someone who knows how to handle a camera.

“There are lots of clever people out there in Sweden,” says Nilsson. “People breaking new barriers for what’s possible online.” Dueholm adds: “There’s a lot of interest in new technologies and generally very high standards, all of which help people to create and execute strong campaigns.” It seems that Sweden isn’t going to be resting on its directorial laurels anytime soon.