Framing the Nation. Spaces of Everyday Life in Scandinavian Documentaries

National film cultures always to a large degree reflect and mirror different aspects of everyday life of the nation they belong to. Scandinavian documentaries frame the realities of the nation seen from micro perspectives of everyday life: individuals, families, groups, regions and places. However, they can also try to grasp the essence of national cultures from a macro perspective, a portrait of the history and the multitudes of realities in a nation, including the nation as part of an increasingly globalized space. In this article, I deal with very different documentaries from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, documentaries that show differences and similarities between three welfare states, use different narrative and aesthetic strategies and documentary genres, but also show cultural similarities between Scandinavian countries. The analysis moves from a large-scale national perspective to regional spaces and places, and combines perspectives of everyday life, families, social groups and individuals with institutional dimensions of nations.