Aniara

As a consequence of drastic environmental changes and war, Earth has become uninhabitable. This is the premise for Swedish sci-fi drama Aniara, based on the epic poem by Nobel laureate Harry Matinson.

The solution? Leaving Earth behind on the spaceship Aniara, eerily similar to the infamous ferry shuttling between Norway and Denmark (or Sweden and Poland, or Britain and Ireland… You get the jist), transporting thousands of earthlings to a new life on Mars. Everything seems to be going swimmingly – but when the spaceship has to steer clear of a meteor and is thrown off-course, the general mood quickly sours. Without any knowledge of when – or if! – they will ever reach their destination, the internal battle of individual passengers becomes the focus of the film. Some channel their desperation into pure survival instinct, others into a nihilist frame of mind, or a spiritual quest for a bigger purpose. In the midst of all this, the enigmatic computer system Mima, a machine built to mimic an authentic sense of life on Earth, becomes ever more important to the marooned passengers aboard the Aniara.

Directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja have taken one of the genuinely huge Swedish works of fiction throughout history, and crafted a razor sharp critique of civilisation and a vision of the extinction of humanity. Aniara places humans in the centre as a highly destructive force on one hand, and on the other a tiny and insignificant thing in the context of the infinity of the Universe. The result is Nordic genre film at its very best.