1. The man and the cultural debate
Has the young man left the public cultural debate? The issue has been discussed on cultural sites and in social media since the journalist Johanna Fränden in a column called for more guys in the discussion about duality and family formation.
“In the end, you get to a point where the discussion feels worn out and meaningless. Above all, you wonder if the first sex has nothing to add to the debate. Hello guys, where are you? Do you want to shout?” she wrote, among other things.
Expressen’s cultural director Victor Malm hooked on the train and stated that in the public conversation he saw a “new and depressing difference” and named the cultural man an endangered species. In a text in Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet’s cultural director Lisa Irenius said that an explanation for men’s increasing absence in the cultural debate is connected with “growing differences between the sexes in terms of interests and values”.
– At the same time, there is a transformation of the public where many men choose to try new arenas, in tech, podcasts and social media, she said.
2. How true must a documentary be?
When the newspaper Kvartal criticized director Hogir Hirori’s Golden Bug Award-winning documentary “Sabaya” for containing fake scenes, it did not take long before the debate about what a documentary is really started.
Hogir Hirori himself emphasized that documentary film as a genre and in its form differs from journalism.
“Documentary film is not a neutral narrative form. Especially in Sweden, where it as a genre has reached a high artistic status, it is an established narrative form that promotes the personal gaze, one’s own expression and that encourages independent filmmakers to portray their image of the world,” he wrote in a statement published on the film’s website.
SVT’s program director Axel Arnö comments and says that a documentary film “should never lie”, which among other things makes the film journalist Hynek Pallas get angry and write in a text in Expressen that it is confusing and dangerous when documentaries are made synonymous with digging journalism. DN’s Johan Croneman’s contribution to the debate is that SVT’s statement is one “stone age analysis” and that documentary is always the filmmaker’s truth.
The “wait in the room” debate
A few weeks ago, the hashtag “Swedengate” suddenly trended on social media. The background was an English-language post on Reddit about Swedish dinner traditions, where a person answered the question “What is the strangest thing you have had to do at someone’s home because of their culture or religion?”:
“I remember visiting my Swedish friend. And while we were playing in his room, his mother shouted that dinner was ready. And listen here – he told me to wait for his room while they ate,” the person writes.
Suddenly, Swedish food culture was in the spotlight for an international debate that generated a flood of tweets and memes. But the debate was also about Swedish hospitality and racism.