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.

Argentina, during the period from 1976-1983, was not a good place to look even remotely like a dissident. The era, known as the ‘Dirty War’, saw widespread violence carried out by Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta against those it perceived as enemies of the state – students, journalists, trade unionists and Peronist guerillas (see the Night of the Pencils, Ezeiza Massacre, Margarita Belén Massacre and Luis Mendia’s death flights for examples). Assaults, assassinations and kidnappings were rife, and somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared, leaving no official trace of their fates.

This set the stage for the formation of a group known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named for the plaza in central Buenos Aires where they first gathered. The Mothers are one of the more interesting protest movements of the late 20th century, and also a bunch of remarkable badasses.

Formed in 1977, the Mothers set out to pressure the government into admitting the fates of their disappeared children, the Desaparecidos. On the 30th of April that year sixteen women gathered outside the presidential palace to stage a demonstration, demanding to know what had happened to theirs sons and daughters. Consider that this was right in the middle of the Dirty War, when state-sponsored death squads were meting out harsh discipline pretty much with impunity. How staggeringly brave and determined do you have to be, at a time like that, to march up to the presidential palace and demand answers? This isn’t a movement that formed years later, in safety under a civilian government – they stood up to the military junta right from the start, despite the risks.

A poster of the missing

In a time when the government sought to isolate individuals, to separate and control people through application of terror, the Mothers gave a unified voice. They acted publicly, sharing their stories, gathering others to their cause. It was by no means a safe or easy course of action (fully one quarter of the founding Mothers were also disappeared before the junta left power in 1983), but they managed to grow a movement that is still going.

The ongoing work of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo has not gone on unnoticed. It has earned them international awards from bodies such as UNESCO and the European Parliament. It has also been met with harassment and repression. Three of the organization’s founding members have joined the ranks of the disappeared since its work began.

– Bruce Allen

Since the fall of the junta and the return to civilian government, the pressure exerted by the Mothers has resulted in several hundred of the missing being identified, or their remains found. Many younger children turned out to have been given to adoptive loyalist families, and the Mothers have acted as intermediaries to help these children come to terms with their pasts and interact with both their adoptive and birth families.

Beyond just finding the missing, many of the Mothers have seen it as their duty to carry on the dreams of their children, to live for the causes that got them taken in the first place. To this end the group has grown to encompass other political causes, including the founding of a university, libraries and bookshops, and the provision of healthcare subsidies.

What makes the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo particularly interesting is the boundary-crossing nature of their protest. A lot of activist movements and protest campaigns become unfortunately mired in divisions, locking out valuable voices (see the refusal by key female American activists to accept the black suffrage movement in the early 20th century, or the frequent erasure of trans* and non-white issues among a lot of modern groups). The Mothers, by contrast, brought together several spheres of Argentinean culture.

One of the early demonstrations by the Mothers, outside the Presidential Palace.

Active in the central business areas of Buenos Aires, and by all accounts an urban movement, they nevertheless counted many rural Argentinians amongst their number. Age divides were crossed too, with a Grandmothers division of the group who continued the work of their kidnapped children, and looked after the offspring of disappeared Mothers.

Following the return to civilian government in 1983, and the Trial of the Juntas in ’85, the Mothers went international. Argentina hadn’t been the only South American country to disappear dissidents during that time (see: Operation Condor), and the Mothers sought to bring international pressure down on countries that still hadn’t come clean about their activities, particularly the Pinochet regime in Chile.

“One of the most beautiful things that came out of my work with the Grandmothers was learning that there was so much interest and solidarity from people in other parts of the world. It was an extraordinarily positive experience. We have had support from the women’s movement, from the CHA [Comité Homosexual Argentino], and from the transsexual groups.”

– Nélida de Navajas, quoted in Rita Arditti’s Searching for Life

The Mothers are still active today, still working for answers about the fates of the thousands who remain unaccounted for, and still promoting the ideals and social changes their children were kidnapped for. They still march through the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, in addition to a larger annual March of Resistance.

For further reading:

• Searching For Life by Rita Arditti
• Circle of Love Over Death by Matilde Mellibovsky
• Revolutionizing Motherhood by Marguerite Bovard

(Note: This post is primarily concerned with the Founding Line branch of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Association faction, who split off in 1986, are more radical in their politics. They also do some very good work, but have publicly expressed some views that are difficult to endorse.)