Pride and joy
Stockholm Pride director Māns Nyman speaks to DQ about coming to television for the first time to helm this six-part series, which follows three friends navigating complicated personal lives during the week leading up to the titular Swedish celebration.
In 2023, television cameras swept into Stockholm’s annual Pride parade to record scenes for an upcoming series described at once as chaotic, comical, human and hopeful. Now 12 months on, as the Swedish capital prepares for this year’s event, the drama is set to debut on local streamer CMore and TV4.
Stockholm Pride – known locally as Happy Jävla Pride, or Happy Fucking Pride – follows a trio of characters across six episodes as they navigate different dilemmas and disasters in their personal lives while attempting to have the best Pride week ever.
Country boy Dilan arrives in the city looking forward to meeting Christoph, but their first encounter does not go as planned. He is unable to fit in with Christoph’s sexually experienced group of friends, and begins to doubt whether his feelings are reciprocated.
Dilan comes to stay with his cousin Ari, who is seemingly confident and self-assured yet hides past traumas. When he suddenly splits up with his boyfriend Jonas and plans a wild Pride week, why is he running from commitment?
Then there’s Ari’s best friend Nina, who also comes to stay after being dumped by her girlfriend Sascha but has big plans to win her back.
Produced by Unlimited Stories and distributed by Beta Film, the projects marks the first television series from director Måns Nyman (Stammisar) – and also the first time he has directed a scripted project he hasn’t also written himself. On this occasion, Sebastian Johansson and Melina Maraki partnered on the scripts alongside script consultant Fredrik Apollo Asplund.
Joining the series late in development – and with a fixed shooting schedule to ensure some scenes could be captured during the real Pride event last year – Nyman was drawn to the universal themes and experiences of the characters, and took on the challenge to direct all six episodes.
“I got a call from the producer, Isaac Inger, saying they were looking for a director for this TV show,” Nyman tells DQ. “I was scouting projects at that time and there was a show called Happy Fucking Pride. I read the synopsis and felt there were a lot of things I could relate to, even though I’m not gay myself or a member of the community. But still, there were so many issues about relationships I could connect with that it was interesting for me.”
By this time, it was January 2023, with filming set to begin in May and culminate in shooting at Pride at the end of July. This meant Nyman and the production team faced a race against time to get the scripts finished and complete casting and location scouting.
That Nyman was shooting all six episodes himself meant he “just got to work, and it was full speed until the last day of shooting,” with the biggest part of production taking place in the weeks before Pride. Then during the event, footage was captured in Stockholm’s Pride Park – the city’s Östermalms IP sports ground that hosts concerts and parties. Authenticity throughout the series was particularly important to the director, which was why he didn’t want the show to construct its own park area. “Then of course the parade itself had to be real also, because it’s too large to fake,” he notes.
Discussions with the Stockholm Pride organisers had taken place before he joined the project, so it was always the producers’ intention to shoot scenes for real. “That was one of the selling points. It’s a missed opportunity not to get that footage,” he continues.
“We got their full support and had almost everything we wanted from them. We even got a slot for our own truck to be in the parade. They were super happy to do it. We also wanted that truck to be something that could contribute to the parade, and not just taking up space or being a boring production truck. We had our own sound system and we filled it with people who were basically just partying. Then we hid a lot of camera people around so they could get coverage of it.”
Importantly, the production also had to make it clear to Pride participants that they were making a TV series during the parade, so anyone who didn’t want to be on film could avoid the cameras or contact the show’s executives if they didn’t want to appear in the background.
Authenticity was also key during the casting process, with Nyman explaining that most of the cast are part of the LGBTQ+ community, while the show also brought in a consultant to advise the production at every stage. “A lot of the crew were also from the community so there was never an issue,” the director says. “Then I could concentrate on the production and directing the story.”
That story features themes of dating, first loves, heartbreak and insecurity, with Dilan (Oscar Wallgren) feeling inadequate against the “cooler” Christoph (Malte Legros Selander). “He thinks that in order to get the interest of Christoph, he has to impress him, which is also the advice he gets from his older cousin,” Nyman explains. “Then he starts telling a lot of lies about himself, and it gets him into trouble. That would be something that could happen to anyone, and it’s also the comedy part of putting yourself into more trouble than you had to. The answer, of course, is just be yourself and everything will be fine. You can’t base a relationship on a lie anyway. That’s the story for him.”
Ari (Carlos Romero Cruz)’s commitment problems stem from the sense of rejection he felt when he first came out to his parents, meaning he prefers to keep his relationships casual to prevent anyone getting close to him. When his boyfriend Jonas (Johan L Heinstedt) wants to take things further, it leads Ari to break up with him – and pass on the same advice about casual dating to Dilan.
Meanwhile, Nina (Sofia Kappel) struggles with self-confidence in a disastrous relationship with Sacha (Roshi Hoss), and ultimately discovers she needs to break free to find out what she really wants in life.
“All of this takes place during one week, so there’s lots of twists and turns, and Dilan has to try to experience Pride the way his older cousin tells him too,” Nyman says. “This leads to various moments where he tries to get some sexual experience but, of course, he’s not a casual person so he can’t go through with it. It’s too much for him. He wants the romance and real emotions.”
All three central characters share the spotlight during the series – a challenge that was worked out during the scriptwriting stage before production began as the writers and Nyman sought to bring the trio together on screen as much as possible.
“The problem was that the time is too short [in each episode] to give them enough space, because you want to get emotionally involved in all the characters. Therefore, all the stuff that happens to them is really extreme and a lot of it is over the top, to keep it interesting,” the director notes. “This show would look totally different and the situations would be totally different if this was a longer format, and we’d go deeper into the mechanisms behind their behaviour, but now we can see the results of their past.
“Everything is over the top somehow, and that’s the tone I was aiming for, to have something you could just laugh at. Our main goal was entertainment – entertainment with a heart.”
With that in mind, Nyman strived to create a “super sunny” series that showcases Stockholm Pride in every shot, “so you get the impression this whole city is breathing the Pride festival.” In most exterior shots, the rainbow flag can be seen, while he also wanted to capture the “buzzy feeling” leading up the parade at the end of the series.
“One thing that was really important to me was feeling like everybody is talking about this [event], that this is the reality of this world, that it’s Stockholm Pride. ‘Better get all your shit together by then,’” he says.
“I also wanted it to feel like if you’ve been to Stockholm and been part of this community, you would recognise yourself somehow, so we were always filming on location in the real nightclubs and trying to capture the atmosphere of those places. There are a lot of party scenes. That’s something I was also part of when I was younger, the club culture here, so I knew how I wanted those moments to feel.”
Working with actors, Nyman always prefers to rehearse a lot, try out scenes and rewrite them if possible, as well as experimenting with the camera blocking so the characters’ movements are slightly choreographed. On Stockholm Pride, he didn’t have as much rehearsal time as he would have liked, but he was always available to speak to the actors about how to perform certain scenes, what the essence of a character moment might be and the kinds of emotions they would be dealing with.
Unusually, he also used different takes of the same scene to highlight various emotions. “I was like, ‘How would it be if you played it this way in this take?’ and we did another take and said, ‘Oh, maybe approach the scene differently,’ so then I would have more choices in editing,” he reveals. “Can we take it up more, can we take it down more? What does the tempo need? I like to work with music a lot too, so music was a big part of the show. That came in editing. I didn’t make any choices about music beforehand, but afterwards we were spending a lot of time with the music.”
Nyman wanted to create an all-Swedish soundtrack featuring local artists, while also avoiding the Schlager style of catchy pop music viewers might expect in the series. “I didn’t want to use too much of that because I wanted it to be a little unexpected,” he says. “I employed hip-hop music producer MakhiBeatz, who created the score for the series, with little jingles or tempo beats that could lead the story from one character to another all the time, so everything has this 90s hip-hop beat that is uptempo and creates a cool attitude and atmosphere to the show.”
Shaking up the music behind the series – 1970s rock band Noise also feature on the soundtrack – was another way Nyman tried to open up the world of the show, as well as tapping into the universal themes and challenges that face its main characters. “We wanted everyone to be able to connect with these characters and the series. That was the reason I got involved also, to make it available for all people somehow,” he says. “I don’t want the audience to look into this world, I want them to be part of this world.
After completing his first television series, the director, who has previously shot numerous Zara Larsson music videos, would definitely allow more time to shoot the large crowd scenes featured in the show, particularly ones set in the nightclubs where it would have been difficult to communicate with his cast and crew members against the backdrop of loud music or hundreds of dancers.
But when the series debuts on TV4 on July 31 – Stockholm Pride begins on Monday – he hopes viewers will be “hyped up” to attend the event. “It would be good to watch and then go out and have fun,” he says, “to get a good warm feeling inside about your life and know everything is going to be OK.”
tagged in: Beta Film, CMore, Happy Jävla Pride, Māns Nyman, Stockholm Pride, TV4, Unlimited Stories