Three fathers accompany their daughters on a school trip to an island in the Stockholm archipelago. Bill is the sensitive one, Bobo seems the steadier, and Pontus is confident and without boundaries. The island is idyllic; the trip is not. The adults find themselves stranded with an unruly secondary-school class, and their own adolescent injuries start surfacing. Along with the children, they have to face how hard it is to draw the line between play and a dangerous struggle for power \u2014 and how hard it is to say who is the victim and who the perpetrator.<\/p>\n
The idea didn’t come from a desk. Schulman has two teenage daughters, and he went along on one of their class trips. What he saw there \u2014 the way the children treated one another \u2014 he later described as nightmarish. The film grew out of that, and he makes no secret of what he was after: “I’ve always been amused by the idea of making a story where absolutely everything goes to hell. I’ve had a few solid attempts at it in various novels, but I feel that in this film I’ve finally got all the way there.” The subject isn’t really the children. It’s the parents: a generation of adults who, for all their good intentions, have lost both their authority and their ability to set limits.<\/p>\n
Alex Schulman is one of Sweden’s most widely read contemporary writers; The Survivors (\u00d6verlevarna, 2020) was published in more than thirty countries within a year. Arkipelag is his first film, and it isn’t adapted from his own fiction \u2014 he wrote an original screenplay for it. Shooting began in May 2025 in the Stockholm archipelago, the landscape he described as looking beautiful and romantic from a distance, while up close the anxiety screams out of the graffiti scratched into the bed frames of the old summer-camp cabins.<\/p>\n
Gustaf Skarsg\u00e5rd, Fares Fares and Linus Wahlgren play the three fathers. The film was made with the support of the Swedish Film Institute, and is one of three titles under consideration as Sweden’s Oscar submission. It opens in Swedish cinemas in autumn 2026.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three fathers accompany their daughters on a school trip to an island in the Stockholm archipelago. Bill is the sensitive one, Bobo seems the steadier, and Pontus is confident and without boundaries. The island is idyllic; the trip is not. The adults find themselves stranded with an unruly secondary-school class, and their own adolescent injuries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":35285,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n