Seppan

I was about 11 years old and my teacher took our class to a low budget cinema where they used to (and perhaps they still do) show films for younger people. We saw many horrible films at that cinema, but I think Seppan must have been the worst. Today i probably would have thought of it's oddity as fun, but for a child it's just too strange to be good in any way. Several scenes are very strange. 1. A little girl walk on top of a fence and seconds later she falls down and is hurt so bad between her legs, that she starts to bleed. Her mom thinks she's just got her first period. 2. A boy plays with his friends and little sister on a railway, suddenly a train appears and hits the girl who is instantly killed. The boy just looks at her and walks away as if nothing really had happened. You never get to see the parents reactions either. 3. A boy tries to impress a girl by cutting his palm with a knife. Later he just walks into a lake and drowns. 4. Two girls hide out in a playhouse and compare colors of their genitals, until one of the girls mom discover them and gets furious.

I really want to see this movie again, because a film can't be as twisted as i thought Seppan was when i saw it as an eleven year-old. I have thought of the film many times during my childhood and wondered what anyone could like about it. If i saw it today, i might find the plot reasonable in some way, but as i remember, it was a scary experience.

This is a wonderful movie, the first by director Agneta Fagerstrom-Olsson, dealing a lot with her own childhood experiences. It follows mainly working-class kids on the verge of puberty, as they try to make their big souls fit into a rather limited world.

Usually, when working-class is portrayed in movies, they are simplified, as if belonging to a lesser race than those of the other classes. Not so here. The dreams, the longings of all human beings, are given room here, expressed through the minds and actions of kids from very simple circumstances.

The director, who also wrote the script, has an ability to get under the skin of the characters, make them come alive to an extent rare on cinema (well, this production was for TV). What makes the deepest impression on me, is that she somehow captures the most fragile essence of the characters, that which makes them real, really real.