A snail on a doctor's visit, a mole in the parliament's press room and a bunch of insects praying to God inside the Swiss particle physics laboratory CERN. These are some of the scenes in Niki Lindroth von Bahr's new film Something to Remember.

She usually describes her films as modern fables, where social criticism and darkness are embedded in the talking, cute animal dolls. And anyone who has seen Niki Lindroth von Bahr's previous films recognizes the lonely animals and meticulously detailed environments, which are now also exhibited in physical form at the Färgfabriken art hall in Stockholm in connection with the premiere.

- I started this movie a few months after I had a baby. For me, it was a bit like showing my child what our time looks like now, with all the anxiety that comes with it, ”Niki Lindroth von Bahr tells the Culture News.

Dark cradle

It was when she started looking for cradles for her newborn daughter that Niki Lindroth von Bahr got the idea for her new movie. In Something to Remember, the animals showcase a rewritten, more dystopian version of Alice Tegnér's and Elsa Beskow's child-wise Frog song. Comedian Martin Luuk and musician Hans Appelqvist, just like in the previous film My Burden (2017), stand for song lyrics and music.

- My child slept very well from that song and then I was very much anxious to do something similar, like a cradle for the big disaster, a slightly darker version.

Something to remember is Niki Lindroth von Bahr's fourth animated short film. All in all, her modern fables have brought home over a hundred film awards and her goldbag award-winning film My burden has been on an international tour ever since it came out in 2017.

Child culture vs. highbrow

But despite the successes, Niki Lindroth von Bahr describes that it is financially difficult to work with animated short films in Sweden, and that there is no established scene for films that are not "ordinary" long films.

- In Sweden, animation is very much associated with children's culture and not so much more, while in France, for example, it is considered part of the highbrow culture. There, everyone was silent when my movie was shown. Afterwards, they came forward and said it was reminiscent of Kafka, she says.

Her backstage-building and stop motion technology is time-consuming - the movie My Burden, which is 14 minutes long, took two and a half years to do. The result is environments that are so skillfully recreated that they are almost indistinguishable from reality.

You build scenes that could almost be filmed out of reality, which would save you some jobs. Why?

- I think it will be like small monuments of contemporary times, even in its slightly uglier form. We must also remember this, whether we want it or not.