The 2025 FSF Day

Saturday June 14th, an expectant crowd gathered at the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) in Stockholm, eager to be inspired by this year’s edition of the FSF Day -featuring distinguished British cinematographer Christopher Ross BSC as its Special Guest Star.  The FSF Day is an annual event arranged by The Swedish Society of Cinematographers (the FSF) with invaluable support from the SFI and our untiring sponsors. This one was a very full day indeed, consisting of two major seminars, and drew a respectable audience from the local Scandinavian filmmaking community. 

There’s a really friendly and humorous atmosphere as everyone mingles among the amazing products on display in the tech exhibit in the foyer, while waiting to get into the cinema, but soon the audience is allowed in and get seated in the Victor cinema, and we’re up and running!   FSF co-President Alex Lindén introduces the first presentation of the day, a Masterclass featuring recent BAFTA-winner Christopher Ross BSC moderated by Lars Pettersson FSF.  And with a career spanning two decades and  23 features, four entire seasons of episodic TV as well as dozens of episodes, many award nominations and wins -where does one begin?

Well, why not from the beginning… Hailing from London, England, Christopher’s fascination with cinema began at an early age, watching films while growing up. By his mid teens, he knew he wanted to have a career in motion pictures. But as his parents were convinced a life in pictures would mean almost guaranteed permanent unemployment, it was decided he should study physics at the University of Nottingham. However, as fate would have it, there he met a kindred spirit and together they began making dozens of short films, and a year after graduating Chris became an employee of Panavision UK, servicing cameras and lenses. ”It became my film school really”, Ross explains, ”There were lots of DP’s coming and going and it was my job to help them. Haris Zambarloukos, Seamus MacGarvey…had a huge impact on my learning. Biggest impact was Brian Tufano who would watch my short films and give me invaluable pointers on where I went wrong and where I could make improvements. Although it was tough and hard to hear at the time, I now use the gift of those lessons every day”.

And here the FSF have a little surprise for Chris, as Seamus MacGarvey ASC BSC has recorded a little video greeting for him, and for the audience, which is shown on the big screen, wishing us all a splendid day together!

One thing led to another, and while still an employee of Panavision, in 2006 Chris photographed his first feature film ”London to Brighton”, written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams. Shot on super-16mm on a modest budget, this neo-noir crime film follows two young women pursued by gangsters, and we follow their flight as described by the films title. The film became a critical success and earned good reviews. In particular, influential film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote a positive review in which Chris’ contribution to the piece was pointed out, and any cinematographer knows that this doesn’t happen very often.

So now his career as a notable Director of Photography had really begun, and his fourth feature film ”Eden Lake” (2008) put not only him, but almost the entire cast, firmly on the map. ”Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O’Connell were not well-known and hadn’t appeared much in films at that time”, Ross remembers with a smile, ”but now they’re all superstars!”

His early features were all shot on film, but by the time of his eight film, digital had become the norm, and his years at Panavision had him well poised to handle the transition from film to digital. Also about this time, 2012, he received a BSC award for excellence in cinematography in a Television Drama (for ”Blackout”), and was invited to become a BSC member.   

”Black Sea” (2014), starring Jude Law in a very committed performance as a submarine commander, was Ross’ first film backed by a major Hollywood studio and with a massive budget -although, thanks to skillful choices made by the filmmakers, it looks like it cost a lot more than it really did. Ross experimented with using LEDs in his lighting of the confined quarters of the submarine interiors, and had to use fixtures intended for office spaces, since this was before LEDs became widely available in professional movie lighting. ”In reality, in submarines there are only levers and wheels to shut valves”, he clarifies, ”but in movies submarines are always depicted as having steering wheels, or sticks almost like airplanes, so we used that convention here as well”.

In preparing for this Masterclass I asked Chris ”is there a Chris Ross style?” And he himself doesn’t feel there is, but he certainly tends to hang his imagery more around elements of character and story rather than purely pictorial ideals. So in a way, this amounts to a style, one could argue, since there’s always a feeling of empathy with the characters in close-ups and medium shots, and there’s a lot of smooth camera movement going on, giving you the feeling that you are there in the room and are free to take a step sideways to get a better view. Finally, there’s consistently very good visual orientation. So, as an audience, we always know where we are, and we always feel we’re with the characters, and we feel for them.

In 2017, Christopher Ross had a first opportunity to collaborate with Director Danny Boyle on the TV series ”Trust”. This led to Boyle offering him to shoot the feature film ”Yesterday” a year later. A romantic comedy/fantasy film with the interesting premise that through a freak accident everyone on earth has become oblivious to the music of the Beatles, except for one young man who remembers their entire catalogue, and can now pretend that he wrote all those wonderful songs! Of course he becomes a superstar and many funny and touching situations ensue.

In 2019 he worked on two films -interestingly, both musicals- ”Everybody’s talking about Jamie” and ”Cats”, his biggest project so far at that time. This movie version of the famous Andrew Lloyd Webber stage hit was gargantuan, both in terms of its budget and its use of oversized sets, on the average typically three times the size of normal everyday objects, meaning an ordinary door would be over 20 feet high, etc. This posed the cinematographer with both unusual and interesting challenges, as one would perhaps normally ”cheat” the light from a practical nightstand fixture with say a 300w fresnel -Chris now had to use a 4K HMI to do the same thing!

Even though it chronologically was shot the year after ”Shogun” and ”The Swimmers” -since it’s such an endearing story, we next opted to cover Chris’s 2022 film, ”The Great Escaper”, starring Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson.  The cinematographer has many fond memories and funny stories from working with these two icons, and in both cases it became their last film. Michael Caine made a deliberate decision to end his career on a high note with this film, and Glenda Jackson sadly passed away so that she was not able to see the finished film.

As the story is about a venerable D-Day veteran who ”goes AWOL” so to speak, because he wants to join the D-Day celebrations in Normandie, the production obviously needed to film Michael Caine traveling with a ferry from Dover to Calais, something which normally would have involved the very expensive rental of an actual ferry. Not so on this occasion, though. ”Because it was Michael Caine, they simply gave us a ferry to do what we liked with”, Chris recalls.

The year 2022 also brought Christopher Ross another great honor, as he was elected President of the BSC.

Rounding out the Masterclass are three very recent and very well received projects: the feature film ”The Swimmers” (2022) and the TV series ”Shogun” (2021) and ”Day of the Jackal” (2023). In discussing these three pictures, Christopher also invites us to learn how he likes to prepare for a film project, and we are treated to excerpts from the special Mood Films he prepares during pre-production for a project. In the case of ”The Swimmers”, I myself could have sworn that there were several shots from the actual film in the Mood Film! So well has Chris and his collaborators crafted the scripted scenes for the actual movie that they are almost indistinguishable from the actual documentary footage used in the Mood Film!  

Christopher is rightfully very proud of his work on ”Shogun” as it won him a BAFTA for the episode ”Anjin” and we are treated to a few scenes from this episode in which a 16th century period Dutch trading ship almost perishes during a violent storm. The sequence is a tour de force of immersive cinematography, production design (a full-size ship was actually built!) and imperceptible visual effects, as much of the roaring waves is computer graphics. The first season of ”Shogun” was positively showered with Emmy awards -an unprecedented total of 18 Emmy wins!

The final piece to be screened also showcases some of Christopher Ross’ most recent work: ”The Day of the Jackal”, a British spy thriller TV series, based on the Frederick Forsyth novel and the eponymous 1973 film. It stars Eddie Redmayne as a ruthless British assassin, known only as “the Jackal”.

We are shown two very elaborate scenes involving long takes with very fluid moving camera work of the ”how-did-they-do-that?” calibre, and Chris explains how parts of the set were swung in and out of frame to allow the seemingly impossible camera movement. Again, Chris’ Mood Films took much inspiration from 1970s Alan J Pakula thrillers like ”The Parallax View” and ”Klute” and this is also evident in the finished product.

As the ”The Day of the Jackal” clip fades away from the screen and the house lights come up again, that also concludes the FSF Day Masterclass, and Christopher Ross is met with well-deserved thundering applause.

We then all depart for a somewhat late lunch break, before the afternoon continues with a brief but fascinating technical demonstration from Igelkott Studios, state-of-the-art experts at simulating shots of moving vehicles. Run by CEO Eric Hasso, the company has been providing an impressive number of productions with flawless car interior scenes since its inception almost ten years ago now. The Igelkott team create their background plates in a very special way, allowing them to actually pan around within the footage, which helps speed things up on set. And the name Igelkott means ”hedgehog” in Swedish in case you wondered –the company is so named in reference to owner Eric Hasso’s hairdo. 

Focusing on the thin line between documentary and fiction, the third entry of the day was called ”Blurring Boundaries” and consisted of a long conversation between moderator  and FSF co-President Malin Nicander FSF and four distinguished cinematographers. They were Gosia Szylak PSC, Pia Letho, Jon Rudberg and Marek Septimus Wieser, the latter three all members of the FSF. Christopher Ross BSC was also invited to join the panel. Interestingly, almost everyone participating in this panel had studied at the famous Polish film school in Lodz!

Pia Letho opened with a few scenes from a documentary about the King of Sweden, which was about a year in the making. One challenge on this project was the difficulty of getting physically close to the king. ”There were always so many guards, so I focussed a lot on details, doors, stairs, carpets, all the things surrounding the king, which he passes all the time”, Lehto explains. ”And one day we had a steadicam operator with us, so I used the steadicam to offer the audience the point of view of His Majesty himself, what he sees when he inspects his royal guards”. 

Next up is Marek Septimus Wieser who shows us a few clips from ”Det Nya Landet” (2000) a TV-series which he shot in the late nineties. Directed by Geir Hansteen Jörgensen, the series was written by Lukas Moodysson and Peter Birro, and very inspired by the Danish Dogma movement, so it was decided to shoot it with MiniDV cameras. ”They were so light that we could use them as if they were an extension of our own hands”, Wieser remembers, ”moving the camera in towards a subject was like stretching out your hand”. This opens up a discussion about the authenticity of technology, and everyone agrees that MiniDV from 30 years ago is like a Time Machine, it looks like reality.

An impressive sequence from ”Communion”, a 2016 documentary film directed by Anna Zamecka, introduces our third panelist here today: Polish cinematographer Gosia Szylak PSC. ”Before starting a documentary project I ideally want to be able to spend 2-3 days with the protagonist, the subject of the piece,” Szylak clarifies, ”It can be difficult for the protagonist, but since I’m a very shy person, this is challenging for me as well”. 

The protagonist here is 14 year old Ola, a girl who has to take care of her family -the father is alcoholic and the mother is absent. Ola wants to use the celebration of her 13-year-old brother Nikodem’s Holy Communion as a pretext  to bring her mother back to the family.  

The scenes we watch from ”Communion” are startling, frequently both touching and hilarious at the same time. One quickly begins to think one is watching scripted and staged situations -when in fact it is reality and nothing was ever repeated! In a pivotal scene from the Holy Communion, the priest is posing questions in random order and when Nikodem goes ”Dude, ask the questions in order!” Ola angrily corrects her sibling ”You don’t call him dude, you call him Father!”

Jon and Chris, though they have made documentaries as well, are frequently asked to make a fiction film look more like a documentary. Chris explains that ”I often try -on fiction films- to make repeatable, scripted, action seem like it were non-repeatable non-scripted documentary situations, to make it more believable to the audience. ’The Swimmers’ is a case in point here, where I’ve tried to mimic the techniques you use on real documentaries, make it look like it’s shot by an empathetic observer in the corner of a room, to make the realistic look more real”.

For his work on the Swedish police procedural series ”Tunna Blå Linjen” (literally: ’The Thin Blue Line’) Jon Rudberg has deservedly received much critical acclaim, and again here one can clearly see the ambition to make fiction film look more like a documentary put into practice. ”I’m sometimes more working for the editor than the director”, Rudberg muses. ”I make sure to get that shot and that shot, so the editing will work. Also, I find it’s easier to use one camera in most cases, because when you use two cameras you become more cautious, because you worry you’ll mess up the other operator’s shot”.

Interestingly, in his documentary work, Jon Rudberg is also often asked to make the final result look more like fiction. But he does not subscribe to the ”fly-on-the-wall” ideology. ”I don’t really believe in that concept,” Rudberg clarifies, ”There’s a guy in the corner with a camera –filming you. That’s a very weird situation. And the protagonist is supposed to pretend like he’s not there. So I feel it’s a lot more honest to be upfront with your subject and let them know you’re here and you’re part of this.  Our protagonists, we are not filming THEM, we’re filming WITH them”.

In closing, Malin Nicander shows us a clip from a documentary she is currently filming, focusing on a husband and wife and their three preschool daughters, where the father is terminally ill, and hasn’t got long to live.

And one can only conclude, that when you are watching fiction, you somehow know that these are actors and they are not really in the predicament the story wants you to believe they are. But when watching a documentary, as spectators we can’t evade the dilemmas in the same way. We are really watching a father who has very little time left to live, interacting with his young daughters, and if that doesn’t affect you, you may want to check if you have any pulse at all.

And on that note the 2025 FSF Day presentations end, and Malin Nicander and her panelists on stage are met with well-deserved applause.

As the audience begin to move towards the foyer, lingering in impromptu groups chatting about the recently shared experience, the FSF crew begin the scramble of tearing the cameras and lighting down. Soon everything has been sorted, and as we exit through the doors of the SFI, the wonder of Scandinavian summer means that even though it’s 6 PM in the evening, the bright clear blue skies would have you think it’s early morning. 

Lars Pettersson FSF