Detail from the book voice under.

Board Game with Beautiful Rubbish

Something must break


Pojktanten


Board Game with Beautiful Rubbish

voice under
2023
English
240 pages
Softcover, 13 x 20 cm
ISBN 9788867495993
Design by Mika Kastner
https://kastner.studio/




voice under—the very first book of Swedish film director, artist, and artistic researcher Ester M. Bergsmark—gathers a collection of texts which explore and play with the concept of “voice under” through encounters, with examples from Ester M. Bergsmark’s filmmaking; from other filmmakers and artists; as well as more theoretical renderings of bodies, gender, trans experiences, desire, violence, and trauma. The intention is to open up a wider sensory register in both the creation and the experience of film by looking closely at, challenging, and playing with different cinematic conventions around truth, authenticity, storytelling, the visual, and the visible.

order here:
https://www.moussemagazine.it/shop/ester-m-bergsmark-voice-under/

“How can the language and imagery of film be used to reach beyond language and imagery? How can a more capacious imagination be activated? The unique potential of film exists in its dizzying ability to create other images and other worlds. Film opens us up to the sensuous. When film activates our memories and feelings, it also creates the possibility of other and different ways of being with them. That is what is filmic about film, and this potential is a queer potential. Because what is queer cannot be reduced to what is visible to the camera.”

—Ester M. Bergsmark

Pojktanten  (She male Snails)

2012. 74 min. Hybrid/documentary/fiction.




She Male Snails consists of scenes with Ester and Eli in a steaming bath, in candlelight, images filled with con- versation, skin, and touch. Added to this are sequences with a handful of pojktanter of different ages and in different garments, wordless, staged in charged, beautiful, and disquieting situations. The documentary elements are woven together with  dreamlike fictional scenes, personal voice overs with images of landscapes between city and nature where beauty clashes with the raw and ugly.

A feature film between and beyond documentary film and fiction, fantasy and reality.



Producer:
Anna-Maria Kantarius

Original music:
Mirejam Shala, Magnus Engstedt

Cinematographer:
Minka Jakerson, Ester Martin Bergsmark

Editing:
Britta Norell, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Björn Kessler

Actors:
Josef Waldfogel , Lea Stojanov
Varg Holmdahl, Thea Walther
Elena Smon Wolay

“A film that went beyond ordinary storytelling and achieved a philosophical quality by touching on a very sensitive, even existential theme: the fragile structure that we call our personality. The film showed the diversity and uncertainty of human nature, which is easily shaken, or even destroyed: What you are depends on what people see in you, which is not necessarily the same things you see in yourself. The film talks about the delicate interaction between what you want to be and what you should be, and puts the spotlight on the hidden sides of the self.”

- Jessica Hausner
Direcor/writer of: Lourdes (2009) Amour Fou (2014) Little Joe (2019)

2014
85 min
Fiction feature film.



“Something Must Break tells the story of a young trans woman named Ellie (Saga Becker) who falls in love with a cis man named Andreas (Iggy Malmborg). Writer-director Ester Martin Bergsmark created a potent film about transgender sexuality, and how it rubs up against the virulent transmisogyny of society. For the first time, I saw the subtle nuances of my own life and desires explicitly reflected on film.”
- Cathy Brennan  Mubi, Notebook

“Never has
anal finger penetration
been so
romantic”

Script
Eli Levén, Ester Martin Bergsmark

Director
Ester M. Bergsmark

Producer:
Anna-Maria Kantarius

Cinematographer:
Lisabi Fridell,
Minka Jakerson

Editing:
Ester M. Bergsmark, Andreas
Nilsson

Actors:
Saga Becker, Iggy Malmborg, Shima Niavarani

Based on
The novel Du är rötterna som
sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats by Eli Levén

Traumaturgy

Essay
2023

Traumaturgy consists of a kind of fragmented position that with the help of promiscuous narration, taking as its point of departure desire and inspiration, can create stories that make room for pleasure, where violence can be present but does not dictate who you are and where a narrow, frozen, restricted state of being can be expanded and turned into a more dynamic movement.

Read the essay from the book voice under here:

https://www.moussemagazine.it/publishing/ester-m-bergsmark-voiceunder-book/

A place that holds an ambivalence that has to do with trans, the experience of being trans and of living with society’s skewed ideas about what authentic gender is. The experience of having a body, a form that does not correspond to the exterior, and at the same time ex- pressing what is inside us as delicately as we do. The experience of trauma and of being fragmented. All these experiences together with the extraordinary desire to feel alive and feel unity. Another word for fragmented could be the possibility to hold complexity, which is an incredibly beautiful skill.