The Excavation of New Swedish Children’s Film History : Exploring the Ambiguous Generic Identity of Children’s Films in Sweden from 1914 to 1923

Swedish children's film has established an outstanding reputation all around the world, especially since the 1940s when many quality films for young audiences came into production. In this context, Swedish children's film scholars often set its beginning in the mid-1940s. However, some films were already referred to as such in the 1920s and even before that. Nevertheless, little research on the very first Swedish children's films has conducted yet. This project, built primarily on archival research, aims to reveal how the contemporaries conceptualised the generic identity of children’s film from 1914 to 1923 – that is, from the recurring appearance of the term in daily papers to the first children’s film cluster – and thereby to offer a new perspective to Swedish children’s film history