This is the love story between a single Swedish sex child mother of a minimum and a young Romanian beggar. Josefin and Florin met when Florin was sitting outside the grocery store in Biskopsgården where she lived. We get into the story just in case they get married, backed by life, but dear. They move to a small house outside Halmstad, get pigs and chickens and try to live their lives together.
As in so many relationships, things go up and down. Moments of happiness and mutual understanding are mixed by conflict and emotional walls. Florin fails to get a job and feels inadequate and misunderstood. Josefin, for his part, is burnt from previous relationships and refuses to throw himself into the longing for an accident when Florin rushes to take care of the family back home in Romania.
The film team has been hanging in the skates of the couple for two years, and the camera has managed to become the fly on the wall that allows Josefin and Florin to move freely, naturally and naturally. There is not a second of pretense in the film, the couple actually seem to really be a wonder of down-to-earth freedom of movement. That being said, it is not exciting all the time, sometimes even completely uneventful, but it is inevitable when following a love relationship documentary. Real people do not live their lives by thoughtful, effective storytelling structures.
However, the authenticity weighs heavily, and much of the film's tone lies in the camera work. There is not an ounce of exoticizing the small town or sparsely populated area. The so-so-ugly ugly pictures of tired silage balls in the drizzle or overturned shopping carts on deserted small town squares that photographers seem to have difficulty keeping away from, shine with their absence. Here people are allowed to be people, even though they have old tracksuits and hen houses built of old pallets.
The pair has figured a part in the press. That love began when Florin sat begging outside a grocery store, that is simply a good story. Sure, there will be some inevitable cultural clashes, but most often it will not. In a really strong scene, Josefin tells in detail how it feels to be really hungry, a feeling that characterized her upbringing. How she learned to keep good mine even though hunger rips through the body. For her, the reports from Florin's hometown are not shocking, despite her poor upbringing (or because of?) She is incredibly generous with what little she has. Above all, she is curious about other people and overflows with love.
Romanian "EU migrants" have been the subject of debate in Sweden for almost ten years. The question of begging ban pops up as closely in different municipalities and although in principle all issues of poverty, homelessness and persecution are unresolved, Romanian citizens have become an inevitable part of Swedish society. It is natural that Romanians in Sweden are now taking up the culture. Comic book artist Sara Olausson was out early with her book It Could Be I, and this spring came the poetic film To the Dreamers' Land about a Romanian teenage girl in western Holmsund and about her friendship with Swedish Malin.
Josefin & Florin have the same pathos for the vulnerable (it is done in collaboration with Amnesty) but paints a completely different picture of Sweden, where the contradictions do not go between Swedes and others, but between those who have and those who have not.