A teenage girl’s search for belonging brings her under the spell of a far-right eco-fascist group in Sunniva Eir Tangvik Kveum’s timely debut feature “Nipster,” which will be presented during a showcase of upcoming Nordic projects at Helsinki’s Finnish Film Affair.
Taking its name from a slang term for Nazi hipsters, “Nipster” follows Chris (Saga Stenman), a 15-year-old girl who feels powerless in the face of a world rapidly going up in flames. Longing for a sense of community, she and her friend Maja sign up for a summer camp for young people interested in climate change.
Through her newfound community, Chris begins to blossom, finally becoming part of something bigger than herself. But what appears to be an idyllic summer camp turns out to be a front for an eco-fascist organization looking to recruit impressionable youths. Following her journey, the film tells the story of a lonely and frustrated young girl searching for a sense of self-worth — who finds it in the wrong place.
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Written by Sarah Olsson and produced by Adam Lunenborg for Sweden’s Carbs Film, “Nipster” grew out of Tangvik Kveum’s short film “Rosanazi,” which premiered at the Tromsø Intl. Film Festival in 2016. That film, which follows a teenage girl and her band of misfits who form a neo-Nazi group, introduced the director to the world of Europe’s youth-driven far-right movement, while leaving her with a sense that “there is a bigger story here.”
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Working with Maria Darwish, an academic who specializes in eco-fascism, and Lasse Josephsen, a former far-right activist who is now a journalist and researcher focusing on the Dark Web, Tangvik Kveum began to get a deeper understanding of a far right that has moved from the fringes of alt-right message boards to mainstream social media platforms like TikTok. “It doesn’t look at all like we think it does,” she said, likening her journey to discovering “a completely new world.”
The director soon realized that what’s commonly portrayed as a uniform movement is in fact composed of countless sub-cultures. “You can split up the far right in a lot of different, small cells, and all the different cells have different values, but they hold the same racist, fascist, Nazi ideology,” she said. “If you dig deep enough, you will find it. They share the hate, but…they have different ways to promote their ideology.”
In the case of eco-fascists, Tangvik Kveum said she initially thought that “they use the love of nature as a wolf in sheep’s clothing to recruit people.” However, she came away with the belief that they harbor a “genuine care for nature,” a conviction that they “combined with old terms like [the Nazi slogan] ‘blood and soil’ — that the people born on this soil are the best people to keep it.”
Neither is eco-fascism a newfound phenomenon that coincides with the last decade’s resurgence of the far right, as the director came to learn. The movement in fact traces its roots to Madison Grant, a pioneer of conservationism in America in the late 19th and early 20th century who is often described as its “founding father.” Eco-fascism also had its proponents in Nazi Germany. “We think it’s a new movement, but really, it’s not,” said Tangvik Kveum. “It’s just growing because we have social media and climate anxiety.”
While “Nipster” is in part a coming-of-age tale for its young protagonist, the director said she’s more broadly drawn to the idea of radicalization. “I’m curious about the way that you can get radicalized into [a movement] and on what terms,” she said. “What do you need to lack in order to get radicalized into it? And the process of changing your world view, and adapting this worldview, and the complex dissonance between knowing that…this is wrong, because it’s a new form of hate, but doing it anyway. Until that point where you say, ‘Okay, I gotta leave this.’
“The process of getting in, and the turning point of getting out — that’s the process that really interests me,” she continued. “Because I think we simplify it. All the films I have seen make this process too easy. You can’t just ask someone to change their world view or change how they’ll look at stuff. If you are in such an extreme milieu, it messes with your head really bad.”
Tangvik Kveum and producer Lunenborg will be in Helsinki during Finnish Film Affair, which runs Sept. 25 – 27, to meet with sales agents, distributors and other “new and brave contacts” that can help create a launching pad for the Swedish-language film, which is currently in post-production.
“It’s not a simple movie to pull off. You need to have some courage,” said the director. “I know that it’s heavy, and I know it’s a lot. But I also feel that we need to show some responsibility to show people what this [movement] is. And I think fiction is a really good form to do that.”
