Lukas Moodysson, the very good director who's made "Lilja 4-ever", "Fucking åmål" , "Tillsammans" and "Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced", is now coming out with a film starring basically four people. In Dagens Nyheter today, he said the idea of the film came to him while visiting Skansen (a popular Stockholmian family attraction, where caged animals provide the entertainment), where he watched naked rats trying to squiggle through plexi-glass tubes. The film mostly takes place in an apartment where a home-made pornographic film is made. As usual, which I think is very sane, Moodysson doesn't say much about the film [Swedish]. Questioned if the film is an attack on the porn film industry, he said "I have prepared a good meal, but I can't chew it for you".

People like Moodysson are definitely needed today. In today's interview in Dagens Nyheter, he speaks of the porn industry slightly redefining the norm [this is my translation]:

I'm not attempting to clean up, moralise and make all relations "sound". But it's when degenerate offshoots become the norm that things turn dangerous. In a way you can say that magazines like Slitz and Café are worse than hard-core porn, because those papers make everything OK and normal when it comes to how men should view women. Most people who see really hard-core porn feel it after all is something that is a bit away. You keep it at a distance. But when the pornography keeps pressing, becomes mainstream, it gets worse.

Porn is definitely worse today - if you want to make a porn-historic point. In the 80's, the actors had weird hair-dos, stage names and they built up fantasy worlds. In the 90's everything turned much more documentary. Now part of the excitement is that you're supposed to get a kick from feeling you pity "the girl trapped in the porn-swamp."

I'm dying to see the film. The Swedish premiere is Friday.

Update: here is a link to the Swedish article on Moodysson in DN.