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GÖTEBORG 2025

Ragnhild Ekner • Director of Ultras

“This is probably the grandest project I’ll ever realise – this was the one for me”

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- The Swedish director tells us more about the background to her film examining global football fandom, which was seven years in the making

Ragnhild Ekner • Director of Ultras
(© Annika Elisabeth Von Hausswolff)

Seven years in the making, Ragnhild Ekner’s impressive document on global football fandom, Ultras [+see also:
film review
interview: Ragnhild Ekner
film profile
]
, played in the Nordic Documentary Competition of the 48th Göteborg Film Festival. She sat down to talk to us about her great adventure, spanning eight countries across four continents.

Cineuropa: You appear – or, rather, occur – in the film, in several guises. There’s Ragnhild Ekner, the director, but also Ragnhild, the narrator, and finally Ragnhild, the fan. Can you elaborate on the three of you?
Ragnhild Ekner:
Well, Ragnhild, the director, made the film. Ragnhild, the narrator, tries her best not to exalt herself as a spokesperson for this subculture. My initial aim was to be anonymous, but as the editing progressed, I sensed a need for some articulation on my behalf. Unlike those depicted, who are right in the middle of things, I have gained a more overarching view. Ragnhild, the fan, gets tremendous energy out of football, both going to matches, and the general context of football culture and the fantastic friends I never would have met outside of this collective experience. Of course, all of the Ragnhilds interrelate.

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When did Ragnhild, the director, decide to make this film in the first place?
In 2017, I made a movie called The Traffic Lights Turn Blue Tomorrow, which deals with a graffiti-artist friend who took his own life. It was a painful process with bouts of depression along the way. For relief, I would watch clips from football stands around the world to get energy boosts, which quite concretely helped me complete my film. Then, I started to think that, thanks to my profession as a director, perhaps I could go out into the big, wide world and embark on a great adventure, experiencing those football stands in real life, and document them?

And it resulted in eight different locations across four continents…
…probably the grandest project I’ll ever realise. This was the one for me.

And how easy was it, then, to realise?
It all started with a small amount of support, but it was enough to be able to go to Morocco, where I learned all of the lessons a naïve filmmaker can learn when it comes to getting filming permits, preparing ahead of time, and gaining some knowledge about the relationship between the ultras movement and the police… I think I made every mistake in the book. From then on, being much wiser, we started to very carefully prepare for each destination. Different places had very different procedures, I learned, and different challenges, too. Argentina was very easy; Indonesia was great, and people really wanted in. Italy was hard. I had a great guy in Naples who then dropped out, but I found another great one in Bari, thankfully.

Are the countries randomly selected, or is there a plan here?
There’s a plan, with a special approach for each place. Indonesia deals with the women in the stand, Morocco is about the corruption, Egypt is about the Port Said Stadium riot in 2012… I had even more places in mind, but we felt that eight was a good number in order to get a clear focus. And I’m very happy with the places we visited.

Already at the start of the film, you inform the viewers that they won’t see the faces of the people who talk in this film. “That’s not what’s important,” you say. Can you elaborate on this?
It’s out of loyalty and respect for the subculture. I also want any supporter who sees this film to be able to identify with the people. I like the atmosphere that this brings to the film, with all these voices in different languages, paired with the images of the arenas and their energies.

In the end credits, the name Mia Engberg turns up as “artistic supervisor”. In some ways, such as those voices and those images, and also your own voice-over, Ultras shares some similarities with her films, like Belleville Baby [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
. What kind of input did she provide?
Mia is probably the reason why I make documentaries. In my early twenties, I attended a college course, where Mia turned up and talked about one of her films, Suburban Songs, which unfolded in Hässelby, where I had lived, and she wore a peaked cap, which I also wear. And I thought that if she could be a filmmaker, perhaps so could I. Seven years later, I applied for film school in Stockholm, and there she was again, as part of the selection committee. The rest is family and best friends and creative partners at Story, the production company behind this film, for which Mia provided artistic advice.

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