Förar

„Förår“ is grounded in an early spring landscape and environment. The Swedish word “förar” is taken from the language of farming, where it denotes the period just before sowing and work on the fields begins. The barren and frozen landscape has no sense of an early spring idyll. Instead this is an expectant time, in which a young girl, the film’s central character, is approaching puberty and the moment of transition that this will mean in her life. The camera follows her as she wanders through the village and takes long and seemingly aimless walks across the empty fields. This tough environment has nothing in common with notions of a carefree and happy childhood. Unwelcoming landscapes and domestic scenes show an absence of communication in which the girl is left to herself. Casual scenes with friends are frequently marked by acts of aggression and force that show that the serious side of life is already evident in children’s play. The intensity of the film becomes uncanny, and apparently innocent gestures seen strangely out of place and even threatening. The film’s final sequence is a good example—the girl is seen walking down the village’s main street, carrying a heavy hunting gun, seeming both to have a clear goal in mind and yet also to be lost in the face of an unknown destiny.