‘Raptures,’ First Film Shot in Meänkieli, Covers 1930s Cult in Sweden

Raising financing for and making a claustrophobic debut feature film set in a remote part of northern Sweden in the 1930s and doing so in Meänkieli, a minority language in the country that had never been used for a feature, sounds like a huge task. But in the case of Swedish writer-director Jon Blåhed’s Raptures (Rörelser), debuting at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) this week, this burden is at least matched by the challenges facing a Christian woman trapped in her husband’s sectarian movement and trying to protect her family from his increasingly bizarre teachings.

“At a time when religious extremism is once again on the rise around the world, Jon Blåhed’s simmering drama offers a rejoinder to the dangers of sectarian belief systems,” an IFFR synopsis of the title, screening in the festival‘s Big Screen Competition section, reads. “Rakel lives with her husband Teodor. She is a devout Christian and is initially unsettled when Teodor decides to form his own cult. But her unease soon turns to mistrust and fear as her husband’s worldview becomes more extreme, sharing visions of an imminent apocalypse and promoting sexual congress that challenges Rakel’s strong moral outlook.”

You can get a taste for the film, starring Jessica Grabowsky and Jakob Öhrman, in the trailer below.

Inspired by Bengt Pohjanen’s 1988 novel Dagning, röd! and the real-life Korpela Movement that existed in northern Sweden in the 1930s, the filmmaker also drew on his own experience as the son of a village preacher growing up in a close-knit religious community in the same region of the country for his cautionary tale.

“I grew up with the language because I’m from that region but it’s basically my grandparents’ language on my mother’s side. They spoke it,” Blåhed shared with THR. “I grew up in this small region that is on the border to Finland in Sweden where people still speak this language. But when I was a kid, it was only the old people’s language. It was not considered cool. So us kids were like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to learn it.’ We were stupid. It’s come back now a little bit nowadays. It’s getting a little bit more popular.”

The filmmaker also explained what’s behind the recent resurgence of Meänkieli. “It took a long time but it’s an official minority language in Sweden, and people started to maybe get a little bit more proud of it. It’s coming up a little bit in the cultural world and it’s been on television and stuff, so it’s been heard a little bit more.” That said, not everybody supports minority languages. “The right-wing (people) in Sweden … don’t want to give that much money to support it,” he said.

How challenging was it to write a film mostly in Meänkieli? “I mean, so few people speak or understand it. They say maybe around 70,000 but there are even fewer who speak it fluently,” Blåhed explained. “When I started to write it, I wrote it in Swedish, because I understand it a bit, but I couldn’t ever write in it. I then got it translated. I just said I won’t make the film if we don’t do it in the language, because I wouldn’t be proud of it, and it wouldn’t be true to the story. So, it was impossible for me to not do it in Meänkieli.”

That made financing harder, however. “It took a very long time to fund it,” Blåhed recalled. “It’s very hard to convince people. ‘Oh, we’re going to make this in a language that only these few people understand’.”

Casting was, of course, also affected by the choice of language. “We had to decide that we were going to have mostly Finnish actors because the language is closer to Finnish but in Finland, it’s considered a dialect, so it’s not a political thing in Finland,” the director said. “So I just picked all these great Finnish actors.”

But it took more work and effort. “The actors had a language coach to teach them to speak Meänkieli. And that was also a big job,” recalled Blåhed. “We had this Meänkieli actress from the region read all the lines in the script so they could listen to it. And then we had coaching from the language coach. And then I had her with me throughout the whole shoot, sitting beside me, to just see that the actors said what was written in the script. So that was a big part of it. And then she also was with me in post-production to just be sure that it was all correct.”

Importantly, author Bengt Pohjanen was also involved in the creative process. “He’s a famous figure in the Meänkieli world, and he let me use his book as inspiration, and then he also was the one who translated all the lines,” the writer-director explained. “Everyone knows him up there, so it was good to have his blessing.”

How easy or difficult was the shoot itself once all the language was sorted? “I was a bit worried about how it would be directing,” Blåhed told THR. “But it was easier than I first feared because the actors knew the lines and couldn’t go off-script. So we had a very clear understanding of what we were going to do in every scene.”

Making the movie different from the book was important to him. “It’s super different. I want to be very clear that the book was just inspiration,” he emphasized. “You recognize the themes. The characters’ names are the same as in the book. The main family’s name is the name because the book was also inspired by this family, the main family in the cult. And also, some sequences are inspired by the book, but the book is also inspired by the real events. So, it’s a lot of layers. But it was good for me to get into this family and also have some distance from reality because it’s still a very sensitive topic up there.”

Now, about that cult that the movie explores… “It ended in 1939 but it was around for 10 years,” Blåhed highlighted. “There were a lot of kids that were made during this time, so there are still a lot of relatives of the people who were in the cult around. It’s also such a small region, and I believe it’s in these small places things get stuck in people’s minds for generations. And people have these ideas that they don’t want to talk about it. But then people are also, of course, interested in it. So it’s going to get interesting to go back there because I’m going to go up there and show the film.”

Blåhed’s family history helped inspire the female protagonist Rakel’s portrayal. “My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Laestadian (a pietistic Lutheran revival movement), so she had this really strict Christian belief all her life,” he explained. “She’s not alive anymore but I really liked her, and she was a really calm and soothing person and had this power but was also very quiet as a person. I got really into Rakel as the main character and was inspired by my grandmother and her mentality to understand how she would feel.”

As far as the cult leader Teodor goes, the filmmaker also wanted to show him as a complex character. “From reading all the police reports, I understand the guys’ perspective that they (started off with) a positive way of interpreting the Bible and being more inviting and a little bit lighter. But Theodor in the film also takes over the cult and makes it more extreme. I think his intentions are good, but he can’t really control the position he gets. Also, as he gets more power, people start to like him and he already is a figure in the village who lives in this very nice house and has a bit of money. So he has this position already and takes it to extreme measures. But I think, in his mind, he is not an evil person. I mean that all is maybe not so uncommon with power – that people don’t have bad intentions from the beginning.”

Outsiders saw things very differently. “From the outside, it must have been looking so crazy,” Blåhed argued. “There are also cults going today. From the outside, it looks totally crazy, but I wanted to have a feeling of being inside and being in the main family and see how that would feel.”

The movie shows how the cult at some point starts to turn into more of a sex cult. So, what happened? “That is what people are mostly talking about when they talk about this cult. It was not only the apocalyptic thing but also the sex and all the kids who are made inside this cult,” the filmmaker acknowledged. “They were inspired by the Bible. But it’s so easy to take sections of it that they interpreted as (meaning that) they can do whatever they want, basically. That’s so dangerous about religion – believing in all these different things that people wrote a long time ago, and we are only human, so we can twist it as we want. People usually want to have free sex if they can choose, I guess. And that was one of the things. But drinking was also a big part of it because that was totally forbidden before. And drinking makes you maybe want to do other things. Music had also been also forbidden.”

Audiences may feel her pain when watching Rakel struggle throughout the movie as a focus on the female perspective is key to the experience. “It was super important,” said Blåhed. “And I had a lot of discussions with Jessica, who plays the lead, about how we can understand this character in the 1930s from our modern context. That was the most common feedback when people read the first versions of the script. They were like: ‘Can you make the main character appear stronger? Can she, say, run into a meeting and say, ‘Stop’? But I was like, ‘No, that’s not possible because I want to stay true to the time and the inspirations I had from my grandmother and people from that time’.”

Mostly telling the story from her perspective meant the star had to do a lot of work with her expressions, “basically telling how awful the situation is with her face and just letting things out in a few scenes,” the director mentioned. “Jessica had a hard time just being in this character. As an actor, of course, you feel like you want to do more and you want to be more outspoken, but it was a matter of controlling her and herself. But I think Rakel is a strong person.”

Blåhed didn’t start the project in reference to or in response to any cults or cases of religious extremism in our day and age. “I wrote the first version six, maybe seven years ago,” he mentioned. “But when I started to write the second draft, it was so obvious that this was so timely, and the story was not strange at all in a modern context with cults in different places. You see all over the world, in different ways, religion getting interpreted very strangely. So I thought we could take our time to get it made – it’s going to be just as fresh.”

Speaking of fresh, the filmmaker is already creating new projects. “I’m writing a TV series set in the middle of Sweden that’s more of a thriller, even though Raptures is also a bit on the thriller side,” he told THR. “But this is (set) nowadays and is very political.”

But there is more. “I’m also writing on something completely different,” Blåhed added. “It’s a romantic dark comedy that takes place in northern Sweden but on a ferry between Sweden and Finland. So I again have one leg in Finland, also because my dad is from Finland. And growing up on the border to Finland, I like Finland a lot and I’ve seen a lot of Finnish films. So that’s something that still inspires me.”