An Army of Lovers is a documentary about queer filmmaking as a crucial part of the gay liberation movement in Sweden in the 1970s. In 1977, the same year that the first liberation march paraded through Stockholm, three pivotal queer films began production: Bögjävlar/Damned Queers, Kvinnan i ditt liv är du/The woman in your life is you and Eva & Maria. For the first time, open lesbians and gay men were granted public funding for depicting their own realities, stories about finding love and community and confronting society’s rampant homophobia and traditional gender roles. In this documentary, rich archive is brought to life and recharged with urgency in dialogue with newly shot documentary scenes and interviews with the film activists of the 1970s, capturing the strength and magic in creating another world and living one’s own life.

Ingrid Ryberg (b. 1976) is a Swedish filmmaker and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg. She is the director of the feature length documentary An Army of Lovers (2018), the short Phone Fuck (2009), made for the collection Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn, and the documentary Dragkingdom of Sweden (directed and produced with Åsa Ekman, 2002). Her current research, supported by the Swedish Research Council, explores feminist and queer film cultures in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s. She is co-editor of the book The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures (with Anu Koivunen and Katariina Kyrölä, Manchester University Press 2018), and has published in journals, such as Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, and Porn Studies Journal.

The film is shown in connection with the film seminar Skeive filmhistorier at the National Library the same day.