Ridge

Artist and director John Skoog comes from a little village in Skåne, in southern Sweden. This rural environment is at the center of Ridge, his first full-length feature. The landscape, the people, and the farming businesses and their modern machinery share the starring role. Sometimes, they even seem to merge as they define the non-linear, free associative narrative.

The stories of the local inhabitants are the departure point for the film. Fragments of them emerge and gradually coalesce into vignettes about runaway cows, a young migrant worker, and a teenager who binge drinks with his friends. The stories become part of the landscape, as if Skoog is drawing a map—always keeping his artist’s eye open to the wider picture. Ridge is a painstaking, mysterious, beautifully designed, sensorial impression of a summer and a place.