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Nordic cinema since the 2000s has turned to history to a greater degree than before, employing historical subject matter and settings to entertain, show off costumes and tell stories, but also to contribute with images and sounds to what historian Robert A. Rosenstone calls ‘that larger History . . . that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going’. This chapter discusses the connections to the past made by the genre of the historical film. By historical film I mean films that create stories that take place in the past and not the present. The main questions are: How do Nordic filmmakers interpret and construct Nordic history? How do Nordic filmmakers engage with the past? And, what constitutes history for current filmmakers in the Nordic countries? I discuss four different feature films, from four different countries, in order to show the scope of the new Nordic historical film and different varieties of engagement with the past.

The first chapter is concerned with the cinematic narratives of Eastern noir, which adopt a border discourse and imagine Russia (and thereby often Eastern Europe) as a crime scene. In these crime narratives, Russia is essentialised as a crime scene, where the traces of crime comprise evidence of an omnipresent evil emanating from the centre of power. The chapter argues moreover that whereas Russia serves as the ‘great Other’, in whose gaze the small nations from the Nordic region are controlled and overseen, Eastern Europeans function merely as unfamiliar, rather than threatening, ‘others’. By juxtaposing diversity of genres, including popular Nordic action films (Orion’s Belt and Born American), two documentaries and a television series (Occupied), the chapter shows that the hegemonic Eastern noir narrative, although persistent in mainstream cinema, functions across various modes of cinematic expression. The analyses corroborate the fact that border discourse affords the viewers a sense of safety in the increasingly globalised reality.

Iceland is a very small nation-state with a population of just over 300,000 inhabitants. This chapter addresses the various strategies its filmmakers have reverted to in fashioning a film industry in such a constrained environment. In particular, it emphasizes what is described as “the transnational turn” during the 1990s when Icelandic film producers began to rely heavily on international funding with the Nordic Film and Television Fund and Eurimages playing especially important roles. The effects of this turn on the films of such directors as Friðrik þór Friðriksson and Baltasar Kormákur are studied, while attention is also drawn to the still lingering tradition of local filmmaking.