“We’re Not Naive Enough to Think This Is the Only Truth”: Göran Hugo Olsson on ‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989’

With films like The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has become known for his televisual explorations of historical and political phenomena—predominantly from a distinctly Swedish perspective, for better or worse. Deeply rooted in the audiovisual archives of Sveriges Television (SVT), his films are the result of long and meticulous research, framed as thorough within institutional and ideological constraints. Premiered in the 81st Venice Film Festival’s Out of Competition section, Olsson’s latest archive-based documentary, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 offers a thirty-one-year chronicle of how the two countries and their conflicts were viewed through the "Swedish angle". Framed within a period when SVT held a monopoly on mass audiovisual media, the film reveals how journalistic discourse shaped the political, social, and cultural categories through which both Israel and Palestine were perceived by the Swedish public. 

As with Olsson’s best-known film on the Black Power movement, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV addresses identities, subjects, conflicts, and historical and political turning points that are intrinsically tied to both the past and future of the period the filmmaker chose to focus on—thus establishing a media-specific framework for his explorations. Olsson, working from the premise that archives are inherently biased, focuses more on how these biases are constructed and continuously evolve rather than examining his stance—whether personal, ideological, or critical—on the limitations of archives, what they overlook, or conversely, what they successfully capture and preserve for historical memory. By offering only the most essential information about the documents, Olsson allows the archive to speak for itself—or, in cases of omission, to make its silence heard—trusting that the viewer is equipped to interpret the images and sounds presented to them. However, the film seemingly fails to acknowledge that it too, as a meta-archive, is inevitably subject to the same biases. After all, the principle of impartiality on which its discursive foundation is built loses much of its meaning and value in the face of hundreds of thousands of lost lives.

Documentary met Olsson following the film’s premiere in Venice. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: I know that you first conceived the idea for this film in 2018 while working on another project [May 68] based on Sveriges Television (SVT) archives. I’m curious about your observations on the technical, formal, and perhaps political similarities and differences between this film and your previous work, particularly regarding the processes of researching within the archives, classifying, and collecting materials.

GÖRAN HUGO OLSSON: That’s a rather difficult question to answer. Maybe other films were more documentary-oriented, but this one is very news-heavy. The biggest difference was that we had thousands of hours of material. When I made The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, for instance, it was nothing like that. But the first phase is always the same. It’s like when you go to a library looking for a book because you’re writing an essay and you’re really into it. Then you see another book that looks so attractive because it’s uncharted territory. While looking for something specific, you discover many other things that are not necessarily in order. I remember finding one piece about Israel and another piece about Palestine somewhere else, then I started to connect them in my head and realize that, since the materials are so different in terms of time, expression, and ideas, they needed to be told as a chronicle.

D: Since these materials were already part of the SVT archives, I’m assuming there was an existing database for research. What are the notable characteristics of the materials you came across? 

GHO: It’s a database, but it’s based on paper cards, which we call archive cards. We kept the original archive cards in the film, so you see these frames with numbers, broadcast dates, the producer’s name, the original title, and the type of film stock used. I wanted to include them because sometimes the batter is better than the cake! I wanted to share the freshness with the audience, as if we were peeking into the archive. Instead of trying to seduce them through editing or music in a more traditional way, I wanted to present the materials one by one and make the experience more interactive through these archive cards.

D: You mentioned thousands of hours of footage. On a very practical level, how did the searching, selecting and sorting take place? In the credits we see John Olsson and Emilia Mellberg for the research. Did you personally supervise them?

GHO: I didn’t watch everything in the archives, but you can quickly discern if something is remotely interesting. One category we didn’t include in the film was footage of Swedish singers visiting Israel or Bethlehem. While we watched all the footage from around 1958 many times, as the film neared to the end, we had to deal with a lot more material. But you could read the content while looking up. So we divided them and made a timeline. Let’s say one year corresponds to 10 hours of footage, then I would watch them for 10 hours. Sometimes I would drag the cursor to move back and forth, say, to remember who was the person in question. 

D: Speaking of formats, I didn’t get a chance to look closely at whether a different format was used, but until the eighties, nearly all the footage you used was shot on film stock. How are the preservation conditions at SVT?

GHO: They have a building dedicated to cold storage. It’s an excellent archive and library, especially because they don’t add new films, so there’s no need to make space for new productions, and everything is very well organized. They have two gigantic rooms kept at low temperatures where they store the original film stock.

D: It’s interesting that you bring this up because I was curious about the film being described as the “definitive cinematic account” regarding the SVT archives.

GHO: I think if someone were to do the same film in 10 years, I’m sure they will see things we missed but all in all, I think this is it. 

D: So, you stand by this word, “definitive”?

GHO: Nothing is definitive. We also created a 12-episode television program, with each episode being half an hour long, resulting in a version that lasts six hours. Each of these episodes begins with me standing in the archives, showing all the material. To narrow it down to 3 hours and 20 minutes, we mostly removed sections related to Sweden. We made a true effort to select material that would do justice to what people saw on television. You’ll probably remember that the film’s opening states that the archive material doesn’t necessarily tell us what really happened, but says a lot about how it was told. This is also a way of acknowledging that we understand you do not believe that we are telling the truth—that we’re not naïve enough to think this is the only truth.

D: During the research process, did you also look into the archives of other mainstream media like radio and newspaper?

GHO: We actually did some research, but we never intended to include them in the film. It was more to gain a better sense of the period. Sometimes, we would look into radio archives to find audio bits that could be added to the story. 

D: Regarding the language used by the reporters, how accessible and relevant were these programs to different segments of Swedish society? To what extent did class dynamics influence the creation and reception of these images?

GHO: That’s a great question. Some French or British people who saw the film mentioned that the reporters seemed a bit naive and uneducated on these matters. I think that was a very conscious choice. They made a clear effort to speak to an average Swedish person. It’s definitely not a populist tone; they simply avoided complicated language and made a real effort to unpack the subjects. Whereas, if you look at British media, they often use upper-class, sophisticated language to address educated people like themselves, likely to impress and secure a job at a prestigious newspaper!

D: There are some recurring producer names that can be spotted while watching the film, like Vanna Bäckman and Henry Christensson. Back in the day, these were the people who shot and edited the footage, presenting it within a discursive framework that guided the audience to view the world from a specific angle. Who were they? How involved were they with the issues surrounding Israel and Palestine?

GHO: Basically many of them were foreign correspondents and journalists. But Vanna Bäckman was particularly interested in the Middle East. Speaking of, in the early stages of the project, we thought of reaching out to these producers to have them comment on the material. In the first week of the production. I reached out to Vanna Bäckman but unfortunately she had died in an accident one week before we started. In a way, I lost my main character. She was such a unique and interesting person. She meant a lot to female journalists in Sweden as a role model. 

D: One of the programs featured in the film, titled At Home with Representatives of the Warring Parties, shows an Israeli, a Palestinian, and a Syrian family living in Sweden. The year is 1973, and we see them in their homes, watching news from their region on TV, while the reporter asks them to reflect on how it feels to live in Sweden and follow the war through the news. The entire premise of this program can also be found in Godard’s Ici et ailleurs, which he completed around the same time. Godard initially went to Jordan with Jean-Pierre Gorin to film Palestinian fedayeen in training camps. However, he struggled to edit the material, and then Black September occurred. A couple of years later, he revisited those images with Anne-Marie Miéville, but this time from a critical standpoint, focusing on the theatrics and narratives that the West projected onto the East. I think your film similarly illustrates how the way Swedish reporters filmed and commented on this region inevitably carried those theatrics as well.

GHO: I also made a film [Concerning Violence] based on Frantz Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth, which is also about structural and colonial violence. But I believe that when Godard was making these films, it was a different time. His approach made sense then, but now everyone views images with a similar mindset. We recognize the exoticizing gaze—a view of the Other, often from a male-centered perspective. These things are obvious to us today. Some may qualify my films as post-modern, but I never subscribed to this definition. I prefer the term “meta-modernist.” Because if you saw an image of a starving child, you’d interpret it as simply that—a starving child. By the 80s, you’d question who profited from the image. Today, when I see that image, I already know that people made money out of it, and that is an issue. But that is not the issue—the real issue is the starving child. 

D: In one of the interviews you gave after the film’s premiere, I read that some broadcasters and backers had lost interest in the project until October 7 and the events that followed in Palestine—which, I assume, was the case for several films on the same subject. While it’s important and urgent for these films to be made, there’s a certain hypocrisy in how these gatekeepers decide whose suffering will be seen and discussed. Perhaps you’d like to comment on how this shift in attention affected you after October 7?

GHO: I don’t know… What’s happened over the last 11 months is so devastating that I can’t really answer that question. The pain, the suffering of all these people—you might say innocent people, but it doesn’t matter whether they’re innocent or not—is so intense that I can’t think straight. It’s become an emotional issue for me. I spent five years looking at these images, and suddenly, they’re repeating themselves, a hundred times more violently. I don’t have a way of processing it.

Öykü Sofuoğlu is a Turkish film critic, translator and PhD student based in Paris. Her writings on film have been featured in publications such as MUBI Notebook, In Review Online, and Senses of Cinema.