No, Sara Sjölin admits, she is not actually that big a football fan. “I am not that into the game,” she declares.
Her new film Sportcast 2, screening in CPH:DOX’s Art section, is nonetheless full of the sport. It features extended footage from a match between Malmö and Helsingborg a decade ago. The tackles, fouls, passes and shots on goal wash over her. The words are what really matters here. Instead of the usual commentary, the soundtrack is a raw, confessional and funny monologue from Sjölin herself, reflecting on the break-up of her tempestuous relationship with her former boyfriend, Helmet.
And, yes, making the film was cathartic and therapeutic. The artist was dealing with incredibly intimate material. The structure of the football game gave her the perfect platform in which to address the break-up – and “to make it as unsentimental as possible, just being harsh and honest.”
Sjölin had been in therapy before starting the project.
“It took quite a long time for me to reach the point of dealing with the more intimate parts of the movie…Before I got the idea to do the work, I was going to psychoanalysis. That had a huge impact, also, on the piece.”
The humour wasn’t planned in advance. “When I record, I am not aiming to be funny. Somehow, I enter into a persona that is quite naive…but when I work with it, I find it funny, looking at that persona.”
Both Helmet and Sjölin operate in the cultural field. They enjoy literature and art – but neither are massive football fans. However, she had already used the idea of a sporting event as a vehicle for expressing her innermost emotions in an earlier film Sportcast 1, based around a World Cup game between Sweden and Switzerland in 2018 and featuring voice-over anecdotes about her childhood and upbringing. Now, she wanted to take the concept further.
“I knew from the beginning that it should be a game with Malmö FF because Helmet lived in Malmö when we were dating,” the Copenhagen-based Swedish director explains. Helmet had grown up in Helsingborg (a town he hated). The two teams were arch rivals. This, therefore, seemed the perfect match through which she could explore her relationship with him and his relationship with the two towns where he had spent much of his life.
Although she didn’t pay much attention to the match itself, Sjölin enjoyed the spectacle – the flags the fans were waving and the red smoke they let billow out over the stadium in dramatic fashion before kick-off. The lashing rain added to the atmosphere.
“In this game, I would say the first half of the anecdotes are improvised speech but then, as it becomes more intense, I started to write it down. It’s a mix,” the director explains.
During the game, there is an early flurry of excitement as Malmö rush into a 3-0 lead. Then the match slows down into a bit of a torpor. That allows Sjölin to dig deeper into the broken relationship in her voice-over. (There is nothing too much happening on the pitch to distract her from her thoughts.) As the goal keeper boots the ball down the field, we might hear the voice-over musing on having sex with an Austrian guy whose STDs had “been left untreated for too long.” As one player prepares to take a free kick on the edge of the area, the voice over will talk about the moment Helmet announced the relationship was over. “He announced it was over between us as spring was going into summer. He said that he was still in love with me but that it wasn’t working.”
Sportcast 2 was originally due to premiere in 2020 – but then Covid intervened, delaying the project. She doesn’t know for certain if Helmet has watched it yet as she hasn’t had contact with him for three years – but it seems he likes it. “I know that he knows about it. A friend following him on social media told me that he recommended the movie, so he at least appreciates the artistic value of it…but I don’t know more than that.”
Early in the process, Sjölin reached out to the Swedish International Football League to ask for permission to use the material from the match. “They said it was fine with the rights. I was honest, saying I am an artist. At that point, I didn’t know how far it would go.”
The next challenge was to get the game in “good quality.” The footage on YouTube was very fuzzy. However, an archive gave her a pristine version of the game, complete with the original crowd sounds but with the commentary taken off.
One reason that Sjölin draws so heavily on events in her own life is that she knows that she isn’t infringing on anyone else’s intellectual property.
“It [the work] is often very personal. I guess that’s a way to know that I have the rights!” the artist-director explains why so much of her work has such an autobiographical undertow.
