Swedish Children’s Cinema

Swedish children’s cinema has a long and rich history. It encompasses the rascal films of the 1920s, the realism of the 1940s, the ambitious artistic renewal of the 1970s, the child empowering films of the 1990s through the early 2000s, and the multiple, exceedingly popular, Astrid Lindgren adaptations across the decades. Devoted to exploring this cinematographic legacy, this book offers close readings across academic disciplines, probing various genres, eras, media debates, transmediations, and audience-receptions. Childhood studies, with its critical comprehension of society’s changing notions of childhood, here serves as a key framework in fruitful combination with, inter alia, feminist, queer, intermedial, postcolonial, and eco-critical perspectives. This collection fills an important knowledge gap on Swedish film history as well as the distinctly Nordic tradition of children’s culture, and thereby contributes to the burgeoning field of international children’s cinema research. It is introduced with a foreword by Mark Cousins. 

Malena Janson is a senior lecturer in child culture at Stockholm University. Her research comprises the ideology and aesthetics of children’s cinema, representations of children in audiovisual media, and film education. She has also published extensively on the subjects of film and child culture in national Swedish newspapers and journals.