Liselotte Wajstedt’s Kiruna: Space Road: Experimental ecocinema as elegiac memoir in ‘extractivist’ Sápmi

Abstract This article focuses on the experimental ecocinema of Swedish Sami filmmaker Liselotte Wajstedt, director of Kiruna – Rymdvägen (Kiruna: Space Road) (2013) and the sequel-in-progress, Kiruna – Ortdrivaren (‘Kiruna: The drift block’). The films engage with the effects of mining and extraction on the psyche of citizens in Wajstedt’s home town of Kiruna, in Arctic northern Sweden. Wajstedt’s work contributes to the emerging fields of critical Arctic studies, ecocinema and energy humanities and considers the power of moving images that respond to extractive industry practices and state/corporate storylines within the Fenno-Scandinavian region known as Sápmi.