Killing Gävle
2017 · 20m · United Kingdom
Directed by Joe Fletcher
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
Every Advent, the Swedish town of Gävle erects a 40-foot straw goat — and nearly every year, someone burns it down. Residents from both sides of the decades-long conflict explain their motivations and belief systems.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 20-minute argument disguised as a goat—Fletcher lets both arsonists and builders speak without winking, which somehow makes the whole Nordic ritual-sabotage thing even weirder than if he'd mocked it outright.
The essay film tradition meets community portraiture with remarkable restraint; Fletcher's refusal to editorialize, paired with the deadpan formality of residents explaining their Gävle Goat ideology, recalls the measured documentary lineage of Wiseman and the essayistic rigor of contemporary Nordic filmmaking.
The restraint is the revelation—Fletcher never cuts to the burning, never sensationalizes; instead he lets the residents' matter-of-fact confessions carry the absurdity, a structural choice that transforms what could've been spectacle into something genuinely unsettling.