The Pub Crawl starts at Bar Bobo around sunset. Volunteers of the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival greet all attendees in their neon-yellow vests. The team of the Malmö-based production company RåFILM is making the last preparations to set up the bike-cinema.
Chill jazz music plays from the speakers attached to the bike frame. The seats outside the bar fill quickly with attendees. The relatively young crowd is a mix of students and people who came straight from work, most dressed casually. Everyone is chatting over drinks as we wait until the sun goes down to see the first film.
In the meantime, Celine Dahmer from the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival tells Lundagård about the project and collaboration with RåFILM. The organisers of the film festival released fifty free tickets for the event, and even invited some of the directors and actors to wait at the bars for us. Besides that, she expects more people to join later on. She reminisces about a senior couple who joined spontaneously last year and followed the crowd from bar to bar. Celine provides a glimpse of the evening’s film selection:
– They are short films that are fun, weird, or ”out of the box”, and good to watch in a social setting.
The first film, Chambre Séparée, starts by transporting the audience into a space capsule with two Swedish astronauts who are denied return to Earth due to a pandemic outbreak. As their oxygen level decreases, the situation becomes increasingly tense. The bizarre yet humorous film explores the astronauts’ reactions to this crisis, being stranded in space, confined in their capsule. When the film abruptly comes to an end, the tension gives way to laughter and surprised reactions amongst the audience.
On our way to the next bar, I meet Juli, a film student from Ölands Folkhögskola who visited the pub crawl with her classmates and their teacher, who is part of the RåFILM collective. Juli reflects on the atmosphere of the evening:
– It’s about showing movies that you want to show, to a public that you wouldn’t reach in a ”normal” cinema, and it gives the chance to invite people just passing by to join.
Arriving at our next bar, Storasyster Mastio, the pub crawl is disrupted by the rain. Thus, we wait inside the bar for the rain to stop. While waiting, I take the opportunity to chat with Miles Hardy, a director from Oslo. He is showing one of his films at a closed market screening of the film festival.
– The atmosphere feels more relaxed, and you get to know more people; it’s a cool concept, he says.
He explains to Lundagård that beyond the mere showing of the films, a film festival like Nordisk Panorama usually involves a lot of networking in the film industry, which brought him to Malmö in the first place.
Still waiting for the rain to pass, I meet Alex Veitch from the RåFILM-team. He tells me about the construction process of the mobile bike-cinema:
– It’s unfortunately not one hundred per cent waterproof yet, he jokes, but the film collective built it together with a welder from Chile who took our mediocre idea and materialised our dream.
The motivation behind the mobile cinema comes from the film collective’s desire to control their own screenings, be independent and do public screenings, he explains.
Ariel Avery from the film collective describes the lively ambience of the evening:
– In Swedish we would say folklig, street-party vibes, feeling of togetherness and happening.
Comparing the pub crawl to a regular cinema night, Ariel emphasises the differences in this particular dynamic setting.
– You have a seating and standing arrangement that makes you much more aware that you are part of an audience; you can see each other’s faces and our faces operating the cinema. You see the performance-art effort that we put in, so the distance between the audience and the behind-the-scenes, as well as between audience members, is smaller.
– Then, the experience of leaving and walking to the next place together really matters for the feeling of connectedness. Everybody is an audience; maybe that is also part of the beauty, she continues.
As the rain finally slows down, we continue our cinema night with the film Forest Bathers. This film tells the story of people with burnout who now find themselves all together in a calm meditative therapy in the forest, hugging trees. The film is strangely quiet yet whimsical, and the audience’s soft laughter fills the venue. However, much of the attention is diverted away from the film towards a kid screaming from an upstairs window, seemingly asking about the movie, over and over again. The audience looks up, laughs and waves at the kid.
After the film, we move on quickly. On our way to the next stop, which is Metro near Möllevånstorget, the atmosphere is joyful and playful: the organisers’ team put on party music and sing along to ”Mr Saxobeat”. We watch The Film About Edith , which follows the Norwegian woman Edith who starts speaking Swedish and dreams of becoming the main character in a movie.
The plot of the film was a bit hard to follow, not only because of the introspective main character but also because we are watching the movie in the middle of Möllan’s Saturday night life. A police car drives through the street between the audience sitting on one side and the bike cinema standing on the other side. Only one minute later, other police officers walk by. People continue to move past, stop at the screen for a minute or two, either joining or continuing on their walk.
Joonas Veijanen, who partakes in the film festival as an editor, attends the pub crawl with some friends and reflects on the selection of the films.
– The films are entertaining; people laugh a lot, and it doesn’t matter if you miss a line or two because you understand the theme of the film. So, it’s easy to watch because we are watching in an environment with a lot of distractions.
– It’s more about the experience of the cinema and the collective feeling of watching a film than actually the stories, but I appreciate the films. It’s a cinema, but it’s also a pub crawl. This feels really cosy and homey to me; I am pro do-it-yourself things. I am glad this is part of the festival, he continues.
Then we move on to the fourth bar of the evening: Paloma, where the short film RULES is shown. The film unfolds in a single take, following three people engaged in a sort of drama exercise; however, only one person seems to set the rules, one follows, and one cannot.
Then around ten in the evening, we make our way to our final destination, Brogatan, where the directors and actors of the last short film titled G-String Theory wait for us. The directors Olof and Fred Bendz greet the crowd before the film begins. The film tells the humorous story of a misunderstood physics student and rapper. The two directors, as well as the actors Haider El-Timimi and Ali Taif, thank the crowd for their loud and warm applause.
Olof Bendz recalls the evening and the unique pub crawl cinema.
– You see a police car or an Uber driving by; it’s almost like watching a theatre show. It works with certain types of films; it would be hard with a longer documentary. All films were a sort of comedy to suit the pub crawl atmosphere. It’s fun to show our film that takes place in the streets of Malmö to actually show it in the streets of Malmö.
The evening does not end here. We wait for the announced hot shot after-party to start. A small fire is lit in the courtyard next to the bar, and directors, actors, and attendees mingle while roasting marshmallows and discussing the films.
