We get the sense that people aren’t that interested in the Mima though, that they’re too excited about their future home on Mars, that they’re too busy shopping and imbibing to waste time thinking about a world that was. Customers are transported, virtual-reality-style, into an experience that is supposed to be “our memory of the Earth” and which seems to involve wading through a pristine creek or floating in an idyllic pond. The passengers remove their shoes and lie on the floor, face-down in cushions that are a cross between the gap that you place your face in when getting a professional massage and those blue cubes you sit on during yoga classes. The Mima is like a glowing computer screen taking up the ceiling of a conference-sized room. MR is in charge of the Mima, part-computer, part-living entity. We get a tour of the transport via a cheesy commercial and it’s somewhat reassuring amidst the dark angsty tone of the film to realize that even in the future the language of advertising won’t have evolved much beyond those infomercials we all get to watch in place of live flight attendant demonstrations every time we fly these days. Instead, what we see is Aniara, a shopping mall in the sky with restaurants and stores and discos.

We don’t get to see Earth, but several of the passengers have horribly burned skin and we get the point. She is part of the crew of Aniara, making the three-week trip back and forth between Earth and Mars, transporting people from the planet humans have ruined in the near future to the colony which will be their salvation. It inspired an opera in the 1950s, a heavy metal album by one band and a dance album by another in the 21 st century, and now, a film written and directed by first-time feature directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja.Įmelie Jonsson plays the Mimaroben, MR for short. The author went onto win the Nobel Prize in Literature and his poem has spoken to multiple Swedish artists. It tells the story of the eponymous transportation ship which, on the way to Mars, loses control of its steering and hurtles off-course through outer space carrying three thousand people. In 1956, Swedish author Harry Martinson wrote an epic poem called Aniara.

Aniara poem