Tree-hugging hippies on a trip of mixed emotions

Furthermore, every year a documentary title breaks through to become as popular with cinema-goers as any number of blockbuster sequels, prequels, remakes or reboots. Last year, it was Man on Wire, the tale of tight-rope walker Philippe Petit’s 1974 spanning of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. This year, it looks like British-made doc Three Miles North of Molkom will achieve similar success.

Co-directed by first-timers Corinna Villari-McFarlane and Robert Cannan, Three Miles North of Molkom is a portrait of The No Mind Festival, a new age happening held at idyllic Ängsbacka in west central Sweden every summer. The event aims to help visitors get in touch with their inner selves and live a life that’s more in the moment through workshops and shared experiences, including mass sing-a-longs, sharing circles in tee-pees and shamanic journeys into the woods.

You might think that sounds like a load of mumbo-jumbo, and some of the visitors to Ängsbacka arrive armed with a similar degree of scepticism, but others find The No Mind Festival a profound and/or spiritual experience. Villari-McFarlane and Cannan have opted to sit on the fence and let viewers make up their own minds, and it’s this refusal to judge a fairly esoteric subject that makes Three Miles North of Molkom alternately hilarious and heartfelt, and never less than a constant delight.

Having met while working on British independent movie The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, Villari-McFarlane and Cannan decided to team up to direct their own film. A documentary seemed a common-sense prospect for a pair of newcomers, and when a Swedish friend of Villari-McFarlane’s put them on to Ängsbacka they thought they’d lucked out.

“I contacted them,” Villari-McFarlane says, “and said, ‘Hi, I’m a filmmaker, I produced a film that went to Cannes (The Great Ecstasy), my partner worked with Nick Broomfield on Ghosts, now we want to step out on our own and we’re interested in what you’re doing at Ängsbacka. Would it be possible to make a film with you?’

“And quickly they came back and said no – the process was private and intense, people were going there to go through a journey, etc. Several months later, just six weeks before the festival was due to start, the organisers called back. They said, ‘We’ve decided we are ready to have a film made about us, because our whole ethos is about being honest about who you are, and we want people to know about us.’”

With little preparation time left, the filmmakers immediately paid a visit to Ängsbacka. On arrival they were greeted with a scene that looked like something out of Lukas Moodysson’s Swedish commune comedy Together. “Neither Corinna nor I are hippies,” Cannan says, “but we’re open-minded. When we arrived, there was definitely a vibe about the place. You felt everyone could see through you. The organisers just stared at us for a long, long time, and then one of them said, ‘It feels good. You can make your movie.’ We knew at that moment that things were going to happen.”

Happen they did, and swiftly. Having returned home to raise the minimum financing they’d need for equipment and crew (themselves plus two cinematographers), Villari-McFarlane and Cannan arrived back at Ängsbacka just in time for the opening of The No Mind Festival. They had decided to filter the experience through one of the groups into which visitors are put on arrival, and so needed to cast seven of them quickly. “We wanted a mix of nationalities and a balance of gender and ages,” Cannan says, “but we didn’t have much time to spot the kind of people we thought would engage an audience and have an interesting journey.”

Somehow, within the first six hours the filmmakers found their cast: Siddharta, a Swedish Viking and festival regular who despairs at not being able to find his “maiden”; Mervi, a Finnish grandmother who sells her home to live out her twilight years unconventionally; Nick, an Australian backpacker and cynic; Ljus, a young farmer and wannabe hippie; Marit, a beautiful, enigmatic blonde; Peter, an American father of two taking a break from his wife; and Regina, a Swedish pop princess who arrives at the last minute straight from a lesbian wedding.

Ängsbacka’s workshops give the film its structure (which climaxes with a naked gathering in a sweat lodge), but it’s the reactions of these individuals that provide the laughs and the not inconsiderable emotional impact. Ljus’s declaration that a tree he hugged for an hour has loins generates incredulous looks from Nick and provokes laughter from the audience, while it is genuinely moving to observe Mervi overcoming – at least temporarily – the debilitating emotional scarring caused by her experiences in wartime Finland at the hands of the Russian army. So, while much of the film is weird and funny and entertaining, it also possesses heft, which makes it difficult to write off Ängsbacka as nonsense.

“We could have made a much bleaker movie,” Cannan says, “or a much more bitterly emotional film, or an out-and-out comedy.”

“But we wanted a balance,”

Vallari-McFarlane adds. “When you’re actually there for two weeks, you don’t leave thinking ‘It was so dark’ or ‘It was hilarious’, you leave feeling as if something amazing happened. We want to leave the audience feeling the same way.”

Evidently they do. When the film was shown at the Gothenburg Film Festival,

it won the Audience Award hands down. Its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2008 enjoyed a similarly enthusiastic response. Meanwhile, a screening at the Toronto Film Festival prompted no less than Variety magazine to proclaim, “Three Miles North of Molkom seems prime territory for astudio remake.”

Three Miles North of Molkom (15) is released on September 18.