We follow the tough teen Gemma in her hard life in a Scottish mill with the beautiful name Motherwell: Formerly a thriving countryside but since the steel mill was closed down - by Margaret Thatcher, so it was a while ago - a miserable, poor suburb of Glasgow.
"If you live here, you either get locked up or bang," says Gemma in the first act, which gives a clue as to what is to come.
The mental environment is shabby in a way that only British suburban realism can be; the working class - who no longer have jobs - chews barbed wire for breakfast and then spits it out in bursts of one-sided invective. As in a Ken Loach drama or with an early Lynne Ramsay, but this time it's documentary material, also directed by two Swedes, Ellen Fiske and Ellinor Hallin (who also worked with the Goldbag-nominated Josefin & Florin).
Gemma is in focus but through her we meet a bunch of jaded but rebellious existences that super, smoke, beat thanks. Here, the director duo is dangerously close to romanticizing the extravaganza, but the grim reality takes over. Life is about fighting, most physically but by extension also a coward for survival in a life where you are born with a loser stamp in the forehead.
But for once it is not a flight. Not initially anyway. Gemma looks down at the dragons, who, according to her, abandon the ship: "I'm not running away from things, I'm running towards them."
It's her younger self talking there. She is forced to grow up quickly, which is often the case in an unforgiving environment. We get to keep up with it every now and then, for a few years where a lot of time can happen.
Scheme birds is thus a documentary coming of age drama, where the filmmakers have taken the position as the famous fly on the wall - which is an old misleading expression that rarely gives the whole truth. For, like almost all other documentaries, Fiske and Hallin model reality to fit the structure of classical dramaturgy, so that the relationship between cause and effect takes on the linear form that may not always reflect the whole reality, but nevertheless gives us its essence and triggers. .
Fictionalization causes the boundary between feature films and documents to be blurred, which in itself is not a problem, but it nevertheless raises questions about what did not come along, what did not fit into the tight story that Scheme birds are.
Well, these are academic considerations, it is clear that Scheme birds is a powerful piece of attic realism that, thanks to the living characters, the impressive sense of presence and Ellinor Hallin's accompanying photo, gives us a powerful story that gives added flavor. What happened to Gemma and the others? Unfortunately, documentaries rarely get sequels.