SCANDINAVIAN SINS | Offscreen

Offscreen Film Festival heads north to delve into Scandinavian genre and (s)exploitation cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden and Denmark, in particular, spearheaded a wave of international liberalistion that took the taboo out of sex and loosened the iron grip of film censorship.

It started in the 1950s with what now seems to be the relatively restrained Swedish naturalism, if not quite naturism, of Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika, but as the 1960s advanced, with 1968 being an especially watershed year for popular culture and youth movements, increasingly audacious fare such as Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow) and Jens Jørgen Thorsen's Quiet Days in Clichy stirred up controversy at home and abroad. After the abolition of adult film censorship in Denmark in 1969 and a relaxation of censorship in Sweden, pornography finally erupted into the mainstream. Scandinavia, already perceived abroad as more tolerant and emancipated than the rest of the west, was duly labelled as either a nirvana of permissiveness or the last word in depravity. From light-hearted sex comedies to hardcore porn, films by directors such as Mac Ahlberg or Torgny Wickman (sometimes using pseudonyms) proved wildly popular in the United States and other countries, where Scandinavian erotic cinema helped spark a revolution in attitudes to sex, ultimately leading to the end of stringent film censorship.

In the Nordic countries, while there was a proliferation of hardcore documentary, erotic drama and sex comedy, genres such as science fiction and horror were thinner on the ground. Even so, for this programme we have managed to unearth such remarkable gems as Terror In The Midnight Sun, The Doll, Victor Frankenstein and - one of the festival's most extraordinary discoveries - the mind-blowing Finnish genre hybrid Sensuela.

The festival's Guest of Honour is one of the most arresting faces of the Scandinavian sex-boom: Swedish actress Christina Lindberg, born on 6 December 1950 in Gothenburg, whose credits include erotic classics Maid In Sweden, Exposed, Anita: Swedish Nymphet and the Japanese production Sex & Fury. Iconic status was cemented with her unforgettable lead performance in one of the most notorious exploitation films ever made: Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), which in the United States was retitled They Call Her One Eye, an allusion to the heroine's eye-patch. This gut-punch of a "rape-revenge" scenario, fusing pop-art pulp and ultra-violence, was not only banned in its native Sweden, but also exposed the limits of Scandinavian permissiveness and the relaxation of film censorship: nudity was allowed, explicit violence was not.

With more than 20 films (including March's B-Z double-bill), many of them in unreleased or newly restored versions, we serve up a nourishing Smörgåsbord of rare genre curios, artsploitation and no-holds-barred erotica. Alongside Lindberg, other guests providing further insight include Rickard Gramfors of Sweden's Klubb Super 8 label, author and Danish cinema executive Jack Stevenson, Julian Marsh and Oliver Carter of the Erotic Film Society, and three specialist speakers participating in an international conference on Saturday 9 March.

SCANDINAVIAN SINS | Offscreen

Offscreen photostream