Acts of remembering in documentary film create temporal, audiovisual compilations that interweave historical and imagined realities. They disrupt linear perceptions of temporality, and generate new ways of perceiving, feeling and thinking pasts (and presents) with the films.

In this article-based dissertation, situated between documentary film studies and cultural memory studies, I examine the aesthetics and politics of remembering in Nordic documentary films produced during the 21st century. Remembering is thus related to both the aesthetic form of the films, such as autobiography, the use of archival material and dramatizations, as well as their ethical and political stakes. In the research, remembering is understood as evocative and generative act, where pasts become present in this moment, and the present affects the ways in which we imagine, experience and perceive pasts, as part of the present.

The research delves into the Nordic audiovisual memory culture, where in the recent decades discussions on various “difficult” pasts have been initiated. These relate to, for example, Nordic colonialism or women’s experiences during and after the Second World War. I have examined closer five films, which can be located to the field of Nordic creative documentary. They are Santra and the Talking Trees (2013, dir. Miia Tervo), Sámi Daughter Yoik (2007, dir. Liselotte Wajstedt), Kaisa’s Enchanted Forest (2016, dir. Katja Gauriloff), Auf Wiedersehen Finnland (2010, dir. Virpi Suutari) and The Gold Bug, or Victoria’s Revenge (2014, dir. Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund). Two of the films are directed by Sámi filmmakers (Wajstedt and Gauriloff). The films studied participate in cultural memory work, where questions of belonging and non-belonging, decolonial agency and redeeming history are negotiated. Their topics and production background reflect the transnational nature of contemporary Nordic documentary industry.

Through ”multidirectional” audiovisual analysis, the films included in the research open up new perspectives on the forms and practices of documentary remembering: they seek to re-establish a connection to the world, disrupt and complement dominant historical narratives as well as produce non-linear conceptions of temporality. The films layer, fold and manipulate time, thus diversifying the ways in which we understand the connections between temporalities and historical agencies. In the temporal folds created by the films, historical and fictional times also overlap.

Remembering appears in the films as performative acts that make it possible to reimagine pasts in this moment. In them, both film subjects as well as images and films themselves act as remembering agents. Documentary remembering is thus not only a matter of re-presenting pasts or (re-)mediating remembrance, but of re- creating pasts, while utilizing various aesthetic tactics: audiovisual traces and embodied material-performative acts that affect in the present moment (of the film); gaps created within the film narration that invite the viewer to imagine pasts with the films; and temporal constellations that create connections between historical and fictional temporalities and agencies.

In the research, I discovered four acts of documentary remembering, which generate unique, living aesthetico-political relations with the narrated and experienced pasts. In them, the films reanimate, reclaim as well as seek to redeem and derail pasts. In the acts of remembering, cinematic worlds harness the forces of pasts that appeal to the viewer and the historical moment we live in.