Aniara

When Harry Martinson published his epic poem Aniara in 1956, scholars called the Swedish poet’s book-length work an essential text for the Atomic Age, comparing his accomplishment to Homer, Dante Alighieri, and T.S. Eliot in its scope and symbolism. Following a spacecraft that, while transporting humans from a ruined Earth to a Martian colony, veers off course and drifts aimlessly through the nothingness of space, Martinson sought to capture humanity’s “emptiness” and feelings of oppressive ennui for a species hurtling toward its annihilation. Martinson saw little hope after World War II and the threat of global nuclear disaster in the Cold War. Over a half-century later, when Swedish filmmakers Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja adapted the poem into a feature film in 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, it captured the prevailing despair over climate change doom—the persistent feeling of helplessness to combat the capitalistic forces that continue to deny or conveniently ignore the warning signs outlined by the scientific community. Watching it today, Aniara stings even worse.

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