"The Store" is about a hard-pressed store staff and their escalating conflict with a group of homeless people in a tent camp outside the store.
Almost everyone involved is more or less in trouble. The staff are stressed by the demands for profitability and in the tent camp they struggle to find food for the day.
There are tough working conditions in the store. Employees are punished and hourly substitutes must be prepared to jump in around the clock so as not to lose a chance at the next job. Ami-Ro Sköld describes the constant pursuit of profit as a structural violence that destroys relations between those in the system.
They think back to their time as a store manager.
"My fear of being left out made me push the employees harder than I thought was reasonable. I crossed my own boundaries. When it just continues, there is a risk that it will become normalized.
Both feature film and puppet film
Ami-Ro Sköld resigned after being ordered to dismiss an employee because he had become pregnant. Now that the experiences have been filmed, the film alternates between being a regular feature film and a puppet film.
"The dolls become a symbol of how we are reduced to being functions in a system. The dolls lose parts of the human, they are a little broken and a little fragile. It shows that we cannot be functions of a system without simultaneously breaking down.
Many would say that it is still better to have a job with low pay and precarious conditions than to have no job at all?
"With that reasoning, I think you can exploit people anyway for any wages. This shows enormous contempt for human beings. Many are forced to sit and guard the phone for a few or no hours. No one should have to live under those conditions, it is our joint responsibility to ensure that.
Watch the report about "The Shop" in the clip above.