Light Year

Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Mikael Kristersson and researcher and filmmaker Erin Espelie

Dir. Mikael Kristersson. 2008, 101 mins. DCP. The most personal of all of Mikael Kristersson’s films opens with an impressive, roving, one-take exploration of what will soon be the complete world of the film: Kristersson’s own backyard in Falsterbo, Sweden. Shot over the course of ten years and throughout the various seasons, Light Year is about how time feels, and what it means in a natural environment. Like Kestrel’s Eye and Pica Pica, there is an emphasis on the birds that inhabit the environment. But here, the avian subjects are varied and surrounded by a larger variety of creatures including insects, cats, and of course humans. The result, most evident in the layered audio, is one that is thrillingly active and alive, moving and breathing, and most of all, simply being.

About the speakers

Mikael Kristersson is an award-winning filmmaker, director, and conservationist. Kristersson grew up on a historic farm in Falsterbo, Sweden, located a few hundred meters from world-famous Falsterbo Bird Observatory. Fascinated by the globally unique phenomenon in Falsterbo of millions of birds migrating from Northern Europe to Africa and back again, Kristersson’s artistic career has been accompanied by a lifelong dedication to environmental stewardship. His first theatrically released feature film Pica Pica (1987) achieved great success with critics and audiences and was named “Surprise of the Year” at the festival Cinema du Réel in Paris. Kristersson’s second feature film, the prizewinning and critically-acclaimed Kestrel’s Eye (1998), was seen by over a million cinema and television viewers, and invited to some thirty festivals worldwide. Among other awards, Kestrel’s Eye received the premiere prize for documentary at the Munich, Marseilles, and at Nordisk Panorama film festivals. Kristersson’s third feature film Light Year (2008) was named “Best Swedish Film of the Year, All Categories” by Sydsvenskan’s critic Jan Aghed, was Sweden’s nomination for the Nordic Council Film Prize 2009, and won the first prize at the science festival Mostra de Ciencia e Cinema in Spain in the same year.

Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, researcher, and editor, whose science-based experimental and poetic documentaries have shown at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the British Film Institute’s Experimenta, CPH:DOX, the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and more. She currently serves as Editor in Chief of Natural History magazine, and works at the University of Colorado Boulder as an assistant professor in Cinema Studies & Critical Media Practices and co-director of NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts.