You are what you watch

No shot list

I watched Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in my cabin one evening and fell down a hole. The Swedish filmmaker’s way of composing got under my skin. Wide frames, faces half in shadow, silence allowed to sit inside a shot. By the time Ines and Michi stepped off the train at Söderhamn with no plan and no shot list, I already knew what this trip would look like.

Two Austrians, two days, and whatever the road north from Hop Farm Beach decided to show us.

Hälsingland is the part of Sweden most people drive past on the way to the mountains. Their loss. Three hours north of Stockholm and you get farmhouses with hand-painted walls from the 1700s that nobody queues to see. Icelandic horses tucked into the forest. The Baltic at dusk doing things to the sky that no filter can touch.

Michi sat down at the organ in Hälsingård Erik-Anders where Jan Johansson composed the Pippi Longstocking theme, and played without a note in front of him. We put a 1960 Saab on the highest road in the region. Ines had chips at three in the morning. Your output is a direct result of your input. Mine was Bergman.