ÄTA SOVA DÖ
Sweden
Ever wondered who packs the fresh plastic-sealed salad you are having for lunch? Who are the people getting laid off from their factory jobs in small rural towns? Ready for a visit to another kind of Sweden? When the forceful young Muslim Swedish/Balkan factory worker Raša, who has a ”no-shit, never-say-die” attitude to life, loses her job, she faces unemployment. With no high school diploma, no job – but her boots deeply stained with the mud of the small town she grew up in – Raša finds herself on collision course with society and a comical world of bureaucracy and contradicting values and expectations. First time actors play all of the main characters in the film. www.anagram.se/projekt/eat-sleep-die/
Ever wondered who packs the fresh plastic-sealed salad you are having for lunch? Who are the people getting laid off from their factory jobs in small rural towns? Ready for a visit to another kind of Sweden? When the forceful young Muslim Swedish/Balkan factory worker Raša, who has a ”no-shit, never-say-die” attitude to life, loses her job, she faces unemployment. With no high school diploma, no job – but her boots deeply stained with the mud of the small town she grew up in – Raša finds herself on collision course with society and a comical world of bureaucracy and contradicting values and expectations. First time actors play all of the main characters in the film. www.anagram.se/projekt/eat-sleep-die/
Director's Statement
I wanted to make a film about the people I have always loved, but was sometimes ashamed to be part of. Sweden has an uneasy relationship with its self-image that has to come to terms with its status as an immigration and asylum country. I want to be part of the process of redefining Sweden’s national identity. Someone like Raša, an intense, cocky, straight-forward Muslim working class girl who doesn’t give a shit of what others think about her is an obvious challenge to the way Swedes have traditionally seen themselves. Raša’s story has a lot to do with her own identity and the way people see her, but it also plays out against the background of experiences many young people have in the on-going European economic crisis with high unemployment and increasing internal contradictions within society. But just as importantly I wanted to develop a more personal topic and show the kind of portrait of a father-daughter relationship that I never got to see on screen when I was a young girl.