This poetic and post-apocalyptic sci-fi feature is currently being shot in Stockholm, and will result in one of the very first Swedish feature films set in space.
“Aniara” - written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, is an adaptation of the famous science fiction poem with the same name, written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson during the height of the Cold War.
“Aniara” is the name of a massive spaceship gone awry. Originally bound for Mars carrying thousands of colonists, the spacecraft loses it’s course right after leaving the ravaged Earth behind and the helpless refugees are instead launched into the vast unknown.
Foto: Rutger Sjögrim
During the sixty years that have passed since the book was first published, Aniara has been turned into an opera, a theatre play and translated into multiple languages, but now for the very first time Harry Martinson’s epic space poem will become a film.
The dystopian poem depicts humanity's possible fate after having to leave our home planet, which has been made uninhabitable through environmental destruction.
Foto: Calle Anderson
The Swedish directors have visualized a close future where it is the billionaires rather than the governments who will bring humanity to space, where we export our lifestyle, even after earth’s demise and continue to shop in space - which is part of the reason why the interior of the spacecraft is being shot in different shopping malls in Stockholm, earning the film the nickname; “The world’s first no set-sci-fi”.
- It’s a story about the human race outside of our natural framework - Earth. What is a human being without Earth? No human has ever lived anywhere else but here. Onboard Aniara you get to experience just that, says Pella Kågerman.
“Aniara” is currently being shot in Stockholm. Produced by Annika Rogell, with support from The Swedish Film Institute.
