And something else that makes the project special is that it will be released with a Creative Commons licence at the cinema and online, at the same time. Sköld is calling for a film distribution revolution which will take the power of storytelling out of the hands of a few large corporations and put it back in the hands of the people. If anyone can do it, it sounds like Sköld can: her first feature, Nasty Old People, premiered in 2009 on the front page of The Pirate Bay. The movie was spread online in 113 countries, has been translated into 17 different languages by the audience, and was even screened on Swedish television.

We think it sounds rather splendid, so we got in touch with Hanna to find out more about the project.

Hanna Sköld

Please tell us a bit about the ‘story universe’ of Granny’s Dancing On The Table.

“The story universe emerges from the story about Eini, a lonely girl who grows up outside society. She feels unconnected and she doesn’t belong anywhere. But she has a big imaginative world, and fantasizes about her granny. She runs away from home and goes on a journey to discover the world, but she also starts to discover herself, her sexuality; she finds some people where she can belong. All the time, her granny is some kind of spirit, watching over her.”

This is an obvious one – why grannies?

“We need them. I need them. They are invisible, in the history, in the culture of today, in my everyday life. If you don’t have a direct relation with your own granny, there are not many places you meet grannies.

In Granniverse, the Granny is a metaphor for some things that gets lost in our society. We all have Grannies, we all have stories and feelings about our Grannies, but still old women are made almost invisible in our society. What consequences will this have, which part of our history has been lost because of this? What would happen if that changed? Would life for young men and women of today, or tomorrow, be different?

By playing with the concept of Granny and the meanings we give it, we aim to inspire both the imagination and the reality of the possible answers to these questions.

Granniverse can be seen as an experiment to make always existing, but invisible parts of society visible!”

Did you have a good relationship with your own grandmothers?

“I hardly met them. And this is a big loss in my life. My grandmother on my fathers side died when I was 11, and I only met her a few times. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the same. I grew up very very isolated myself, that’s why I didn’t meet them. I think that’s why I tell this story.”

Elderly women are often stereotyped as crones or as sweet old biddies. Why do you think there are so few representations of old women as individuals?

“I think it’s because we don’t meet them naturally in our daily lives. Many old people are at homes for old people, and we have a way to separate people from each other – due to their age. And especially old women lose a lot of attention, they are not counted anymore, and I think this is because we have too few role models in the history. And also, many young women live all their lives as objects, and not as subjects.”

We heart grannies, but a lot of our heroes are elderly women without children (like Miss Marple and Lolly Willowes). How much is your project specifically about the relationships of women with their grandchildren?

“It’s crucial. Because it’s about young people’s need of older people, but also the cool, unmarried woman has already some kind of status, in a way that the granny doesn’t. But it doesn’t have to be the biological granny. I could maybe borrow someone’s granny, ’cause in the end this project is about how we are all connected, through history, through time, through biological bonds, and just because we are humans.”

We also love the sound of Granny Day! What are your hopes for the day and what it will mean to people?

“I hope that people will get a closer relationship to their grannies all days of the year. Granny Day is all the time!! But it’s also great to have one day when people can celebrate and think of their grannies, and the grannies of the world – the backbone of humanity – a little bit more!!”

Why did you decide to include a game in the mix? What’s it like?

“I wanted us to make a game with a deep meaning and where you challenge yourself creatively! The game will be a 2D, psychological adventure game where you go deep into the subconscious minds of your game characters to find the solution to their problems, ’cause this project is a lot about the deepest places in us. And since we want to make this project as interactive as possible, a game was the obvious thing to do!”

We reckon this is an exciting project with a noble aim. Plus: Grannies! :D But in order to get off the ground, Sköld needs to raise $50,000 by the first of June. She’s already got over $13,000 pledged, but she needs your help – please back Granniverse on Kickstarter now. As Team Granny says:

We invite the audience to take part in Granniverse, economically by crowdfunding, creatively by telling their own stories about their own Grannies, uploading filmclips, sound, pictures and music and socially by collective distribution. By creating, financing and distributing in collaboration with the audience we want to change the landscape of film production and film distribution.

This is an exciting web 3.0 INTERACTIVE post, rather than one that’s full of pictures, because of copyright licensing laws. When you hear this noise – *ping!* – click the link and hopefully the search results will open in a new window for you to enjoy.

Google Images

*ping!*

Google provide personalized search results of course, so what you see when you Google images of feminism is probably different from what I’m seeing. But what I got is for the most part old favourites, and mostly images created by or appropriated by the feminist movement. I love these pictures. But they are getting kind of old:

Ouch!

• Rosie the Riveter (what are we going to do when the 1940s aren’t fashionable anymore?)
• “If I had a hammer… I’d SMASH patriarchy” graphic (a proto-Feminist Hulk? SMASH!)
• The female symbol with fist – actually a little alarming when you think about why that symbol represents the female.  Punching wombs for equality!
• Various classic slogans on t-shirts, badges and banners
• Pictures of Women’s Liberation marches
• The ‘Look, kitten’ cartoon
• A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. It’s ‘Judith beheading Holofernes’, in fact. Bet she was a feminist too – we can’t get enough of violence against men, apparently (more on which later)

In amongst these are the anti-feminist blogger’s illustration of choice, the demotivational poster.

Clipart

*ping!*

These days, some people pretend to be dorky to be cool. I’m the real deal. My major love-in with clipart was at secondary school when I decided to make a school newsletter. No one would do it with me, so I wrote and laid it out and printed it and distributed it in all the classrooms by myself. There was no second issue.

Anyway. Clipart offerings for feminism were pretty thin on the ground, and included:

• A burning bra. Sigh. It never happened, you know.
• A woman dressed as a man! Well, in a shirt and a tie.
• That female symbol again.
• A woman with a placard.
• Three women in red – one in a boardroom, one in a boxing ring, and one hefting her male skating partner on high.

Those women in red are just the tip of the iceberg in representations of feminism as women fighting / besting / attacking / murdering men, it turns out…

Stock Photos

Famously bizarre friend of the low budget publication producer, there is nothing quite like browsing cheap stock photography websites. There’s even a tumblr dedicated to some of the more outlandish findings.

Let’s start with iStockPhoto.

*ping!*

Yes, that’s right. The first image to come up under ‘feminism’ is a woman holding a gun to her sleeping partner’s head. See also:

• Tiny man being crushed by enormous womanfoot
• Man being strangled by a woman, Hammer Horror stylee
• Woman with boxing gloves
• Woman delivering K.O. in boxing gloves (live action and cartoon versions)
• Woman standing on a man’s chest in pose of triumph
• Woman treading on a man’s toe in high heels
• Woman unconvincingly kicking a man in the groin

This startling picture came up under 'feminism' on free stock photo site www.sxc.hu

I find this simultaneously worrying, revealing and hilarious. There we were, slogging away, trying to get recognised as a valid and powerful political movement and to assert our credibility as a critical paradigm, and it turns out all the people creating and using these images are afraid that we’re going to come and BEAT THEM UP.

Other things come up too, but the women-attacking-men theme is pretty striking. One notable exception is this unbelieveable piece of tastelessness: “Sexy woman wearing a Burkha”.

On to Shutterstock, a much friendlier and sexier place, it turns out.

*ping!*

There’s really too great a variety of bizarre representations of feminism here for me to summarise, but highlights include:

• One half of a “sexy young couple” smooshing her partner’s face
• “Glamor still life”
• A serene headless phantom feminist
• An old bag

The violence against men is present, but it’s more symbolic – women are cutting or stamping on their ties – or implied: the boxing gloves are back, and this enterprising young lady has an assault rifle.

There are also a lot of pictures of attractive models looking like they can’t wait to advertise your new cleanser.

Not that I could ever afford to buy pictures from Getty, but I checked them too.

*ping!*

Popular themes seem to be men and women glaring at each other in offices, arm wrestling and tugs-of-war (also in offices) and another disturbing guns-in-bed picture.

Last stop:

Creative Commons

Firstly: I love Creative Commons; it basically makes my job possible (producing decent communications materials for charities). Y’all should donate to support them.

*ping!*

Flickr is the main place I use for CC pics, and what comes up under ‘feminism’ is on the whole just pictures of the day-to-day business of it. Panel debates, speakers, meetings, marches, placards, some cool graffiti…

Not especially glamorous, but less weird and less violent than what stock photography sites seem to think goes on.  For example, I couldn’t find a single picture of a sexy bride in boxing gloves punching a businessman’s head off.