...well no more about me. I'm a Swede after all.

Instead, my take on a mini movie guide to Scandinavia:

To understand the Swedish psyche, watch (not Ingmar Bergman though you can certainly do that too but for other reasons) Lukas Moodysson's Together. A charming drama about a group of people trying to live together in a commune in the 70s. That I can see myself in (almost) all of the characters is a testament to the subtle brilliance of this movie as a guide to the Swedes' mentality. Feel-good, Swedish style.

The Danes, who typically make better movies than us, and their (now extinct?) Dogma movement produced Mifune (an at least not entirely conventional love story between a prostitute and a finance guy stuck at a decrepit farm in the Danish countryside) and The Celebration. Brotherhood with charismatic David Dencik is very good too.

The Norwegians, who certainly have more to be proud of than the Swedes when it comes to their actions during WW2, have produced a series of movies and tv shows to memorialize it. The Saboteurs (Kampen om tungtvannet) is the extremely exciting story of the brave group who in true Norwegian athletic style crossed the mountains on skis to blow up the Nazi's heavy water - an input to atomic bombs - facility. Well-produced, -acted and importantly: the Norwegians speak Norwegian, the Danes Danish and the Germans actual German.

Also, Lykkeland ([the] State of Happiness) dramatizes another interesting piece of modern history: how Norway became an oil producing country in the 1970s - and became the rich next-door neighbor to the great envy of the Swedes. But being the richest doesn't make you the happiest: Finland - to some degree of surprise to their Nordic neighbors - was ranked happiest country in the world for the second year in a row. With the Swedes lagging behind all the other Nordic countries + the Netherlands and Switzerland. Having lost this rather prestigious competition, one theory went that the Swedes have too high expectations on life and are therefore constantly disappointed. Anecdotal evidence from Swedish public television, where a recurring theme is people complaining about the quality of the - by global standards extremely good - public services, suggests there might well be something to this.