A Culture of Reciprocity: The Politics of Cultural Exchange in Contemporary Nordic Genre Film

Tim League, the founder of Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain, and a key figure in distributing genre cinema in the US, outlines several significant developments in the international profile of Nordic film culture. His comments touch on the context where a range of genre films like Iron Sky (Vuorensola, 2012), Død snø/Dead Snow (Wirkola, 2008), The Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (Kemp, 2010) and Kommandør Treholt og Ninja troppen/Norwegian Ninja (Malling, 2010) have broken the perception of a bleak sense of Nordic miserabilism of the Bergman or the Kaurismaki variety. Instead, cinemas of the Nordic countries are now ‘cool’ and receive blessing from both high-minded arts institutions and geeky fans alike. Furthermore, it seems genre has a substantial role to play here with both producers and creative institutions from the Nordic countries embracing its commercial and creative potential. In addition, League’s comments were published in Wired magazine, a venue for tech-savvy media connoisseurs, which reports on the very latest in the intersection of technology and communications.