Den nya människan

The drama The New Man is actually a film about eugenics and Malthusianism, which were very popular ideologies in the first half of the 20th century and were advocated for and inspired by a whole range of top intellectuals and artists. The idea that it is necessary to improve the human gene pool and prevent the reproduction of the less successful had an impact particularly in bourgeois settled and wealthy countries such as Sweden or Switzerland, where similar programs lasted until the first half of the 1970s. Influential journalists and government officials assumed that it was the poor who had inferior genes and that their fertility needed to be regulated, and it was to these efforts that the protagonist of Klaus Härö's film fell victim. Her odyssey through institutions and psychiatric clinics, along with her fight for the right to have her own child, is incomparably more believable, tragic, and emotionally charged than the color-printed emotions and manipulation in Filip Renč's Requiem for a Maiden. A sad, but interesting and instructive film. Eugenics was dealt a blow by Nazism and its program of exterminating inferior nations and the mentally ill, which compromised this ideological trend, so, fortunately, it did not cause greater damage. Overall impression: 80%. (20.09.2010)